Dead leaves

Hi!
please!
I have inherited a beautiful, mature garden. It has lots of daffodils planted and now some are starting to die off, all kinds of interesting things are sprouting.
My question is this....there is a Beech hedge almost all the way around my garden. Obviously the leaves are everywhere, although not on the grass, but they're all over the beds around the plants and under the trees. Should I rake them up, dig them in or leave them where they are. It's a fair sized garden with a couple of small lawn areas, a lot of azaleas, rhododendron and pieris, plus a few small trees and other shrubs. There are various things in books & crannies, alpines mainly, and also some peonies, lupins and 2 massive clumps of pampas.
Any advice would be very welcome.

 

The green on the daffs feed them for next year. Hope you dead headed them after the bloom was done. But, for your answer. if the dead leaves come away with "gentle " raking then you can clean it up that way, if not, and they really bother you, it is best to curl the leaves up in a little bundle for a more tidy look, or tuck them under whatever is larger growing near. For my daffs, I just leave them alone, of course I go through and dead head often as I have daff blooming all the way till end of May.

 

I have beech hedging around half of my garden. I tend to leave the leaves where they fall as A/ there are so many its a pointless exercise to collect them and B/ they provide shelter for insects and beetles and the birds seem to enjoy kicking about in them looking for said insects and beetles

Your Daffodils might appreciate a drink of tomato feed too

 

Welcome to GC @SparklyPurple

I also have a beech hedge along one side of my front garden and at the moment mine still have the winter leaf colour on them and won't drop off until the nice green ones push them out of the way so I wonder if you have a lot of leaves on your grass and in the borders due to strong winds blowing them off?

I have found in the past that if the roots gets too dry at the bottom of the beech hedge then the leaves tend to come off in the winter and I end up with naked branches so I try and use my washing up water to keep the base of the hedge watered throughout the summer and so the hedge doesn't get too stressed and drop their leaves too early

What I do now is I use the water from when I do my washing up and chuck that on the bottom of the hedge throughout the summer and I find that helps with retaining the leaves in winter.

I used to leave the leaves on my borders as was recommended on the gardening programmes as the celebrity gardeners said the worms would drag the leaves down into the soil and would feed the ground but when I did that I found that keel slugs (little black ones) stuck themselves on the dead leaves underneath so they turned out to be a good hiding place so now I collect the leaves up and hope that the slugs drop off so that I can compost the leaves for mulching on the allotment

Tomato feed is good as other members have suggested but I tend to use chicken pellets that I chuck at the base of my plants and shrubs and wait until it rains to wash them into the ground.Sometimes the chicken pellets can pong a bit when on the ground but I find they do tend to deter cats from the borders.

Good Luck and let us know how you get on