What to do with all those leaves
I think my neighbor thinks I’m a little wacky. I had raked some of the fallen leaves into a long thin pile down the center of our front lawn, and I saw him watching me as I repeatedly ran over the pile with the power mower. With each pass, the leaves-and-grass mix got chopped up into smaller pieces. When the bits of leaves were about the size of that last handful of chips at the bottom of the Doritos bag, I raked everything up and chucked it in the compost bin. In the spring, Jen will sift the decomposed mix and put it on the raised beds in the garden.
Later in the day I saw my neighbor trying to stuff some of his leaves into giant brown paper bags. He looked a little frustrated. By evening, he had piled a huge stack of leaf-stuffed bags at the curb. They looked like mutant sausage links. On Monday, the town came by in one of their diesel trucks and hauled the leaf bags to the transfer station 10 miles away. At the transfer station, they’ll load the leaf bags into a giant trash trailer that will get hauled from Connecticut to Ohio. In the spring, my neighbor will inevitably buy more fertilizer to spread on his lawn and meager garden borders. Who’s wacky?
Posted by Jefferson Kolle | Categories: Yard & Garden | Permalink
(5) Comments
why did you not take the leaves for your own use? If I know the person whom racked the leaves I will 'steal' them from the curb, if I know not the leaf-rake(er) I ignore the curb deposit.
I have told my neighbors to dump their leaves in my yard.
Anything thst can save money and the environment these days helps. Thanks for the idea.
I let a few of my suburban co-workers bring their bags of leaves to work and put them in my truck. Got to be careful of doggy do when empting the bags.
In my county, yard trimmings are collected seperately and trucked to a local compost yard. we can then "buy back" the compost. Any county not doing this are costing themselves money, landfilling compostable material costs money in landfil space, and they lose out on income from selling the end product.
I mulch light leaf falls into teh lawn, and only collect the larger piles of leaves into a compost pile. (I have a longer outlook on the compost, so I don't waste gas mulching it for the pile. but leaves, branches, etc that won't work well in my pile go off to the county compost, which reaches high enough temps to sterilize the results.
This is handy because I have slope where nothing grows anyway, but if I had a smaller yard, which many do, there is nothing wrong with leveraging the county compost pile in lieu of occupying an already small lot with a compost pile of your own
A solution to just raking the leaves and throwing them away is to compost them. Leaves are an excellent composting source and during the fall season, they are abundant. If you don’t have a lot that has many trees and leaves, you shouldn’t have any problems getting your neighbors to give you their leaves. In fact, many will be more than willing to give them to you as it is one less thing that they have to do.