I made a post in my local Facebook group looking for pumpkins and hay that people were getting rid of after Halloween and someone offered me 8 bags of leaves they had at the curb. I went over to that neighborhood right before garbage day and saw leaves bagged up in front of most houses (I counted over 90, but didn’t even go through the whole neighborhood I saw them in). I could only manage to grab 50 of them since I don’t have a car (I drive a motorcycle). I pulled these all in a garden cart behind a bicycle lol.
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Cannot stand seeing people put leaves in PLASTIC bags….. fml
This. First of all, they’re LEAVES. Leave them alone (pun intended). If you care about your lawn that much, just rake them somewhere (not sure where but surely you can find a place). And yes, rake. Leaf blowers are perhaps one of the most unnecessary inventions ever, at least for every day / non-industrial projects. (Edit: I have been made aware of the existence of battery powered leaf-blowers. Not sure why I thought only gas existed. My point still stands if your go-to is a gas-powered blower)
People are so obsessed with having a tidy lawn that they just get rid of all the nature that naturally comes
I have a battery powered leaf blower and it’s amazing. It’s not very noisy at all. It moves wet things off my hardscape much more effectively than raking, particularly wet leaves and soil that have collected. I would say “misused” invention rather than unnecessary.
Yay battery powered! Honestly, dumb that I didn’t even think of that. I just can’t understand gas powered leaf blowers.
Costco. 💥
I use electric.
Gas is significantly easier for diy repairs and significantly more powerful.
Every single one of our yard care tools are now officially electric. They all use the exact same battery so we don't have to buy more batteries.
The only gas powered tool I have is a chainsaw. It’s hard to do real tree work with an electric saw.
I was annoyed when my husband bought a leaf blower, but he got a battery powered one, and I was so excited when I realized how quiet it is! We use it in the winter too when the snow isn't super heavy or wet.
He got a battery powered lawnmower of the same brand, and it's amazingly quiet and lightweight, and they use the same batteries! I'm glad I had put him in charge of the yard tools when we got our place, because I definitely wouldn't have thought to get electric ones.
I use my battery powered leaf blower to blow the snow off my wheelchair ramp, since I leave the leaves in my yard now. It works really well.
Downside is they blow bacteria and mold spores around, exposing the soil and potentially spreading diseases to your other plants.
One gram of soil can contain one billion bacteria. Plant material and soil and all manner of things are blowing around my yard and the planet for all kinds of natural reasons all day long and that doesn’t poison my soil, so why would five minutes of blowing leaves off my driveway do so? I think science is not on your side.
Lmao sounds like someone who has never had to care for a property.
Just put them somewhere, duh. lol
"Why are you so obsessed with your yard not turning into a rotting mud pit??"
And can't wrap up your judgy comment without sneaking in some "new tool bad, old tool good" shame.
E: You will never create change in the world if you don't understand the issues you are discussing and have empathy for your fellow humans.
E2: General expert recommendation, for those who might actually be curious:
<20% of your yard covered in leaves = leave them
20%-50% covered = mulch them so they fall down the the dirt level
Over 50% covered = remove down to 50% and mulch or remove down to 20% and leave them
I have never raked up leaves, and I have never had my yard turned into a rotting mud pit. Zone 7a.
So before there were people to rake leaves, the earth was just a marsh all the time?
Have had a house for years and have three large trees. I have never raked the leaves, I just leave them there and have never had any issues or "rotting mud pits".
I know
But one time I had to do it because I was told my township only collected leaves in the fall. And trash is only acceptable in plastic trash bags. So I had to put the paper bags in garbage bags. It’s was phenomenally stupid.
I was in an older home that needed a lot of yard work. I mulched what I could but had piles of branches, clippings and yard waste. The next township over collected and mulched everything and the. Put it all in a pile near their town park for folks to pick up. Mine didn’t, this was in eastern PA.
Ugh I know. I often find myself trying to balance living within the bounds of a society that mandates things I find ridiculous and keeping my sanity with doing what I think makes sense and should be the norm. Sometimes you have to grin and bear it.
Our city requires you to put them in the bin or compostable paper bags, no plastic allowed. Our waste management company sends organic stuff to a commercial composting site though.
I can also drop off as much garden debris I want for free to the same place, they have a giant mountain of stuff they compost. Then you can buy the compost back. It's pretty great.
Whatcha gonna do w them?
My backyard is a parking lot with some “lawn” strips about a foot wide around the edges. I forage and teach foraging classes, so I have a lot of compost. Plus I have 14 guinea pigs and had a rabbit (he passed) so a lot of pellets (about 100 a day per pig). And I do invasive species removal for fun. So I put down cardboard and there’s about 5 “beds” that are about 20 feet long by 2.5 feet wide on top of what was parking lot. Just going to add them to that
This sounds awesome. Would love to see pics
Nice!
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Iono, that's why I'm askin
People would rather waste time taking all their leaves away, and then buy their trees fertilizer to compensate for the nutrients they threw away that would have otherwise been recycled into nutrients for the tree next year.
It's a treadmill to ecological neglect. What's the obsession with wasting time and energy just to have your nature spaces be worse and more boring?
It’s a desire, a lot of the time unconsciously , to emulate feudal lords
Peer pressure from dead people. Also known as Tradition.
Yup. Can't have enemy armies sneaking up on your house unawares by hiding in the tall grass.
Its more to do with English and French manor houses having the labour (ie slaves) and land that they could afford to use for nothing other than aesthetics rather than production. Even castles had crops growing in the fields leading to them
literally this shit makes me SO UPSETTTT “we have so much land we don’t even need, we’re going to show everyone how much we don’t need it by everyone look at the useless crop we’re growing! so neat!” AAAAHHHH NNNNOOOOOO😭
Lmaoooo
https://preview.redd.it/s8dh0gif3m6g1.jpeg?width=4284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d0fbdc63c1a86184b15df9c3dc06c7fcbf498fb1
I found out that the bags end up two blocks from my garden.
Shame on whoever plopped that plastic bag. They know what they did
This is awesome! I've gotten about 10 bags from friends and neighbors thus far for Operation: Kill The Grass, but I need moooore. Great haul there!
If you are still on Facebook, try posting asking for them in a community group. That’s how I found these, plus I got about 60 pumpkins, 5 bales of hay, and I don’t know how many mums and corn shucks.
Nice haul!
How did you manage to carry 50! Bags on a motorcycle. Damn that's commitment
I didn’t. I pulled a cart behind a bicycle
Why?
So they don’t go to the landfill and I can use them and they’ll breakdown into soil like they’re supposed to
This is cool. Thanks for doing good stuff for the overwintering insects, amigo.
They don’t go to the landfill in most places, they go to a city compost pile that can be managed more efficiently rather than have each person manage their own compost pile
My city doesn’t have a compost ( I know this because my brother in law asked me to help pitch one to city council because he thought it would be an easy get rich quick scheme)
Darn that’s too bad. You should still pitch it tbh!
well then I want my leaves back
Leaves and other biodegradable material are an important part of the landfills they use it to layer biodegradable material on top of the trash and run pipes through to vent the methane. Modern sanitation is actually super effecient. The issue is when the plastic bags dont make it into the landfill.
No organic material should ever be sent to be contaminated at a landfill. That’s just disrespectful to the soil that produces it.
Modern human society is disrespectful to the soil. If you like not having to burn your garbage you have to live with the fact that we use biodegradable Material to build trash mountains. Don't use your ignornace of how modern sanitation works to virtue signal.
No, I don’t have to live with that, because on top of living as close to zero waste as I can, composting, investing in various alternatives to landfills like mycocycle, I don’t have to participate in bad destructive systems just because everyone else does and relies on them. Landfills are one of humanity’s stupid ideas and it enables our land destruction and rampant overconsumption and I’m not going to be shamed for proactively doing work to keep leaves from being made toxic.
This all sounds like privlage of owning your own land on which you can maintain your hobbies which is all fine and good but once again maybe you should look into how land fills actually work because its not as bad as you think it is.
Lmfao “the privilege of owning your own land.” I own exactly zero fucking land. I am poor as fuck. The back yard where I’m staying is a fucking parking lot, which I managed to turn into garden beds for food through my “hobbies” as you so snobbishly put it. “Maintain your hobbies” feeding myself and trying to live sustainably isn’t a fucking hobby, and not something for condescending enlightened online people to talk shit to me about. The fucking nerve of an internet knowitall to call me fucking privileged for fucking collecting leaves to use to grow food and native plants WITH A FUCKING BICYCLE. In a NOLAWNS group, no less.
Fuck, I can’t stand these condescending comments and fuck landfills. “Look into how landfills actually work” I hate this redditor bullshit where if someone doesn’t agree with you it’s because they don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re secretly more informed. Newsflash, you know we’re running out of space in landfills right? You know that methane you mentioned? The greenhouse gas several magnitudes stronger than than CO2 at warming the planet? Yeah some of us want to minimize our contributions to making that because we don’t like the idea of needlessly fueling climate change, when we could be making clean soil instead. Those landfills that are also sources of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins that make there way back up the food chain into peoples food. But yeah, we should be sending trees leaves there because they need them. Give me a fucking break
We are not running out of space in landfills thats a myth. Even if you were homeless you would still produce more co2 living in the us than if you were living in an undeveloped nation. Do you burn all of your trash ? What do you do with it i know you have a trash can somewhere. Typical American shit head living off of infrastructure they know nothing about.
It is not a myth. “Industry leaders” say it is a myth, without actually proving it is or disputing the data. Plenty of research showing which states are running out of room and collectively without opening new sites we only had a few decades, and that was before places like China and other Asian countries began refusing to take our plastic “recycling.” Do you have any idea just how much roofing asphalt will need to go to the landfill in the next 5-20 years? Not even touching vinyl siding. “Even if you were homeless you still produce more CO2 than” nice deflection and always incredibly stupid excuse for your argument of why I should be producing more. Did you actually think about that point before you said it? That sounded smart to you? “Typical American shit” this is projection. You’re doing the typical American shit. Someone reduces their impact on the world and you start an argument about it with falsities, whataboutism, and logical fallacies. “Do you burn all your trash?” Genuinely, do you have the memory of an ameba? Just going to ignore that I said I live as zero waste as possible in order to make your bad faith argument because you can’t lose a dumb argument you started with a little dignity? Oh no, I live in a society that dependent on landfills, that means if I ever use one I’m a hypocrite for not sending more than I have to there. As if me saving these leaves means a shortfall of other people sending all their organic matter to the landfill. It’s still more than 30% of all trash sent to the landfill. If the leaves were so fucking necessary, landfills could only operate for part of the year. You’re deliberately making a strawman of me to try to argue, in a nolawns group, for sending leaves to the trash. That’s dumb.
On top of all your other logical fallacies, you’re literally doing this meme. You have done nothing but be disrespectful, wrong, and waste my time.
https://preview.redd.it/3otfoglwis6g1.jpeg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a82bae444af544b7bfa4db2cfa400e81b80159f
I always recommend checking them for potential invasive leftovers/seeds while you unpack each bag. Things like garlic mustard go unnoticed long enough for them to go to seed and then when people pull them they end up with all the leaves.
Just try to learn your local invasive plants and learn to recognize them in various life stages 👍
Can I get some bags for my compost plz?
I picked up 1 bag right before we got a bunch of snow. Next year I will start WAY earlier. Big plans!
Rasta Far I
How do you know those leaves don’t have pesticides?
Multiple reasons. The main one being outside orchards, most people don’t spray trees even if they are diseased. I don’t really care particularly if they were since most pesticides are not persistent after composting anyway (most of them that are are used for grasses, not trees). These are going to be added to tons of compost anyway.
I only got 6 😅 well done!!