Am I Turning Green In My Old Age?

Lots of leaves. They are pretty now but they need to be dealt with in the fall.

It’s fall, and that’s exactly what the leaves do this time of year – fall. This year they were particularly colorful and healthy looking. But if you leave the leaves on the ground, they get wet and cover the lawn like a soggy blanket. They are more difficult to deal with in the spring when they are wet and rotting from being covered in snow all winter and they can overwhelm your lawn, so it is best to deal with them now. In years gone by, before a ban on open fires within the city and the recent emphasis on global warming, we would burn the leaves along with other brush and garden debris. Most people nowadays rake them up and bag them and set them out to the curb for collection. Unfortunately, this creates a monumental amount of landfill for our dumps, not to mention the cost of collecting and transporting this “waste”.

Son Tim makes short work of what would be dozens of bags of leaves.


Here's the video but watch out it's kinda loud.

Mulching seems the best way to reduce them down and its even fun.

For several years now, we have opted to mulch (or grind up) the yearly crop and have reduced our landfill load to nearly zero, only having to dispose of “unmultchable” sticks and brush etc. The resulting vegetable matter is returned to the lawn and reverts back to soil eventually. I figure we mulched up 30 to 50 bags of leaves and there’s still quite a few left on the maple trees yet. I bet we’ll grind up the equivalent of 20 more bags. Think of how much could be diverted away from the landfill sites if everybody used their lawnmower to mulch!

Before and after mulching

I pulled the leaves down the hill with a leaf rake, ready to grind them up.

The "after" pictures show the leaves are nearly gone


This ground up vegetation is good for the lawn and actually helps it survive the winter better.

The "mulching kit" really just blocks the discharge chute and causes the leaves to re-grind. You can buy a mulching kit for most riding and push lawn mowers. Try it!