Where do fallen leaves go?

Crunch, crunch, crunch! In autumn, you can stomp through big piles of fallen leaves. Can you smell their sweet, earthy smell? Many months later, those same leaves are gone.

So where do fallen leaves go? Let's follow one little leaf on the ground under a tree and find out.

Rain falls on our leaf and soaks it through. The wet leaf turns soft and floppy. A soft leaf is easy for small hungry eaters to bite.

Next, tiny fuzzy mold grows on the wet leaf. The mold is alive, and it eats the leaf a little at a time. Now the leaf starts to rot, which means going soft and falling apart.

Soon little bugs crawl over, like round pill bugs and leggy millipedes. They nibble the rotting leaf because it is their food. Their small bites break it into smaller and smaller pieces.

Then an earthworm wiggles up from its tunnel. It pulls the soft, rotting bits down into the ground and eats them. What do you think the worm leaves behind?

Worm poop! It comes out as tiny dark crumbs. Those crumbs mix with the last bits of leaf in the top layer of the ground.

All those dark crumbs become soil, which means the soft brown ground that feeds plants. Our little leaf has turned into soil! That is where fallen leaves go.

Let's remember our two words: rot and soil. Little living things eat fallen leaves, so the leaves rot and turn into soil.

Next time you crunch through fallen leaves, you will know just where they are going.