All right, you compulsive leaf rakers, leaf baggers and leaf senders to the dump, it’s time to examine what you are doing and consider some alternatives. After the droughty summer our maples and oaks just endured, a summer that challenged each tree just to hold on to its leaves until October, you owe it to the trees not to waste their final gift of the season — leaves.

In most communities when you bag leaves and put them out for collection, the final destination is a trash incinerating power plant such as PERC in Orrington. So what’s wrong with that? Plenty, I say.

All the carbon in the leaves (not to mention the plastic bag) ends up as carbon dioxide, a major contributor to the greenhouse effect and global warming. While it is true that nature intended to recycle the leaf carbon in this way anyway, her plan was to do it much more slowly, relying on bacteria and fungi to break the leaves down, release their mineral nutrients to the soil and provide humus for roots and worms.

What about the electricity made from burning leaves? Well, it may be true that some tiny watt or millivolt of leaf-generated electricity might go to a life support system at Eastern Maine Medical Center, but it is more likely to end up powering a light bulb left on by a negligent teen-ager. No, electricity is wonderful stuff, but too much of it goes to waste.

So, why not leave the leaves alone? Maybe that’s where the word “leave” comes from. Some early Anglo-Saxon realized the utter futility of trying to pick up all the fallen leaves, so he just let them lie. And from that point on, any situation that wasn’t worth bothering with reminded him of autumn foliage, so he began saying, “Oh, leave it alone.”

If you can’t bear to leave the leaves alone because they might blow into the low spots and choke out the grass, the next best alternative is to run the lawn mower over them. Just this little bit of chopping is enough to settle most leaves where they are, and speed their conversion to humus.

Or you might try what I did last year, which was to designate a section of my vegetable garden as a permanent leaf mulch area. Here I laid the leaves in an 8-inch layer, choking out all weed growth the following year. I planted pumpkins and squash by making little clearings in the half-rotted leaves the following spring. The result was that I didn’t have to water this section of the garden because the leaf mulch conserved every bit of moisture, and the squash and pumpkins I picked were the best I have ever grown. Something about lying in a bed of fallen leaves as they grew all summer made each pumpkin and squash picture perfect — no blemishes, warts or rotten spots.

If you don’t keep a vegetable garden, you probably know someone who does; why not offer to bag your leaves, if he or she will pick them up? You might even bargain to get the empty bags back.

One horticultural use of leaves I would not recommend is as a mulch on any flower bed containing early spring bulbs such as crocuses, tulips, hyachinths and such. I have known leaves to pack down under the snow and make an almost impenetrable layer over bulbs, spoiling their attempts to beautify the spring garden.

If the idea of putting leaves directly on the garden in autumn is not appealing, there is always the option of composting them. One of the simplest ways is to purchase a few yards of woven wire fencing and steel fence posts. Set up the fencing in a small circle or rectangle and just dump the leaves in. Nature will do the rest, or you can speed things up by mixing in a bit of soil, some manure or nitrogenous fertilizer and enough water to keep the pile moist.

Finally, I must admit that I have written this column once or twice before. But the proliferation of bagged leaves that one sees curbside in Bangor convinces me that the crusade must go on. And I warn my neighbors that any bagged leaves I see around town will go directly into my garden. I can’t bear to just leave them be.

Michael Zuck of Bangor is a horticulturist and the NEWS garden columnist. Send inquiries to him at 2106 Essex St., Bangor, Maine 04401.