Autumn used to be a season of raking leaves (and jumping into the leaf piles as a kid) and the smell of burning leaves. While burning leaves is no longer permitted for safety and air pollution reasons I can’t help but think that the season now has the annoying sound of leaf blowers. I have blogged about the leaf blowers ruining the outdoor seating at many locations in Town Center. Couldn’t these machines be required to be made with “silencers.”
I also wonder why Howard County doesn’t have a system of using trucks that have large vacuums that come around to suck up the leaves that are raked to the curb. My hometown of a couple thousand people has this service and it seems more environmentally friendly than all of us putting our leaves in plastic bags for pick up. Of course I have to say that I have been one of those lazy people who think the wind will eventually take care of the leaf problem in my yard and what leaves remain will provide a natural fertilizer for my yard.
Leaf blowers do something rakes cannot. They work on top of mulch and gravel. Rakes haul the mulch and gravel all over the place.
ReplyDeleteAs for the mulching trucks... Yeah! Why don't we have those? I pay all this extra money for the CA to have drum circles and resident architectural committees, but I have to bag my leaves?
If you want the eco friendly leaf solution, get a mulching mower. When the leaves get too much to mulch into the lawn, bag the leaves and clippings and pile them on top of your old mulch beds (gardens, around trees) and then cover those with more hardwood mulch. No leaf bagging, and you get half the mulch for your garden beds and trees for free. It's what I do. I think I'll even add mulch beds to soak up even more biomass from the leaves.