Thursday, November 06, 2008

Leaf Monsters


For those of you who live outside the Midwestern U.S., you may not be familiar with a phenomenon called leaf pickup.  The amount of deciduous leaves that we generate coat our yards a foot thick, and to maintain air quality, the city bans burning of leaves.  Given the average person's ability to deal with a fire outside, I think that's a fine idea.

But what to do with leaves...they do make excellent compost, so that's what we do.  In specially modified garbage trucks and little leafmobiles (Jeeps with giant brooms on the front), the take the leaves we stack neatly on the parking strip and push them into the street and scoop 'em up. Cool.

If you want compost later it's free for the taking at various sites in the city.  Good leafy compost.

As a kid I never understood Peanuts...having enough leaves to rake into a pile seemed to be impossible, since I grew up where trees were rare and precious.  Now I drag 20 x 20 tarps of leaves from the back to the front curb, maybe a dozen times.  This is an embarrassment of riches, for sure.


Respectfully submitted,

  Leaflover (today anyway)

2 comments:

wsb said...

Did I ever tell you that once they pulled a giant leaf truck up in front of out house and the driver proceeded to jump out of the truck get in another smaller truck that had driven up next to it and left. Leaf truck still running. I almost stole it and started driving to California, then I realized I didn't want to go to california and went back inside/

canoelover said...

No. But that would have been a really clean road in front of you. :-) Love you.