Well, we’ve raked the yard twice so far, and most of the leaves are still on the trees yet. We have a half-acre of yard boasting 10+ deciduous trees (plus, there’s a 100 year-old oak next door whose leaves we usually get)… that’s a LOT of raking. I can’t believe I used to do most of it myself when we first moved here! Thank God for teenagers!
Since burning leaves is forbidden in our township, the town comes through twice a month with their industrial-sized vacuum, and slurps up all the leaves that residents have piled by the curb. We get so many leaves that we do take advantage of this service, but for the other half of the leaves, I compost them for the gardens. It’s an easy, VERY cheap way to fortify your garden soil with all sorts of yummy nutrients!
Composting leaves doesn’t take a fancy bin, either. All you need to do is drive four metal stakes into the ground, and wrap chicken wire around the stakes to keep the leaves from blowing out. I leave one end of our bin open for easy access. Most compost bins that store food matter need to be enclosed with four sides and a lid (to keep the racoons and skunks out of the waste); but leaves are different. You could even just dump the leaves in a big pile in a corner of the yard to decay, although that looks a little ugly and there’s the chance that a windstorm will sweep away your pile (not to mention irritate your neighbors).
The leaves we dumped in our garden this year were from last year’s pile. It was enough to amend a vegetable bed 12 feet by 24 feet. It’s best to roto-till the leaves into the soil ths year, before winter comes. I am *hoping* we get to that this year; if not, we’ll do it before spring planting next year.
After we emptied last year’s leaves, we nearly filled our bin with just one day’s leaf raking work! :S It will settle, though, making way for more.
21. October 2009 at 7:24 pm
that is a great thing to do. Saw your boy having fun in the leaves.I really should start a compost.
21. October 2009 at 11:13 pm
Composting isn’t too hard. It took a while to convince the kids to dump their food waste into our compost bucket– and we even found a few forks and spoons accidentally dumped in the next year… lol… but it’s an easy habit to cultivate. And so beneficial!
22. October 2009 at 1:02 am
I loathe yard work. Playing in the leaves was always fun…