The flip side of the pretty colors I posted about yesterday is that all those nicely colored leaves fall down. Which isn't a big deal with the little ornamental maple in the front yard, but when the fifty-foot oak tree in the back drops its leaves, it kind of makes a mess.
We deal with this in the traditional manner: we pay the next-door neighbors' teenage son to rake the leaves up, and drag them out in front of the house. I didn't get a picture of the whole pile, but it was close to three feet high, and stretched the full length of the front yard. Most of the houses in the neighborhood had similar piles, so the streets were all lined with knee-high berms of leaves, like defensive works against the oncoming winter.
And then, every couple of weeks, they bring out the leaf vacuum:
This is shot through the front window, and shows the town highway department with the enormous vacuum attachment they use to suck up the piles of leaves on the side of the road. They were almost finished by the time I got the camera, so you can only see a tiny fraction of the original pile, but it's an impressive operation.
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What a waste. Sigh. Leaves are compost gold and everyone just gives them away.
I keep mine to put on the garden.
Down the road from the farm where I grew up, there's a topsoil farm. Right about now, they'll be plowing together a mixture of clay (from construction sites), dead leaves (as seen above), manure (from nearby dairy farms) and some starter topsoil to provide soil bacteria and worms. At the end of next summer, they'll scrape it off and sell it.
I keep mine to put on the garden.
The 50-foot oak that is responsible for a large portion of the leaf pile kind of restricts the opportunities for gardening in our yard. Not to mention the row of slightly smaller maples along the fence between our yard and the neighbor's.
Also, we're talking about something like 3-400 cubic feet of leaves, here. How big a garden do you have?
Here's my plan:
(1) Go to Chile for a week to observe.
(2) Mom comes to have Thanksgiving with Wife.
...
(3) Profit!
Wait, that was the Slashdot way. Go back.
(3) Mom wants to "help out" and deals with the leaves.
I guess I should feel guilty... but dealing with the leaves is my absolute least favorite thing about having a lawn.
(Well, weeding is pretty bad too.)
-Rob
Irvine, CA has the solution! Every tree, including the conifers, are chainsawn down to naked skeletons. No tree may cast shade in Irvine. See? Easy! Simply butcher all the greenery then charge taxpayers for periodic replacment. A tree is a tree - and twice a tree for contractor kickbacks. How do you know government is regulating unless it is regulating badly?
What I do with the leaves is just mow over them with my mulching mower a couple of times. The pieces then just fall between the blades of grass, and eventually get incorporated into the lawn.
It's a lot quicker than raking or blowing, too.