Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
written by Alan R Hickman

It was more than a decade ago that the City decided to add my street to the list of those visited annually by the great roaring leaf sucker. I always made sure that I got all my leaves shredded and away from the curb before the vacuum machine arrived so at least I kept my own resources, but all the bags of leaves I used to collect ceased to be. Even some of the people who had previously looked after their own leaves started raking them out to the road for collection.

When, earlier this year, notice came from the City that my street would no longer get leaf ‘service’, it was like the promise of an early Christmas. After the first leaf fall, the adage ‘less is more’ certainly proved to be a truism.

On the eve of the big day - the night before the Region’s regular garbage pickup - all the bulging brown leaf-bags were deployed at the roadside and lined up in groups; ten here, fifteen there, a dozen across the street, arranged like honour guards for a president.

The pickings were so easy. My van will take 14 bags at a time, and, in half-a-dozen trips and not much more than half-an-hour, I picked up 85 bags to empty into my backyard. For no better reason than 100 being a round number, I collected a few more bags the following morning.

It should be noted that all the properties on my end for the street are essentially identical: 1,000 square feet, one-and-a-half stories, on 50 by 130 foot lots. A few, like mine, have very large mature trees, most just have leaves that blow in from some place else. The point is that all the lots are amply big enough to look after their own leaves, and to compost all the garden debris plus the kitchen waste associated with the residence.

Watching people rake leaves is instructive. Some nonchalantly flip leaves into smallish piles and bag each pile. Others push and shove all the leaves into one ginormous heap and then start bagging. Most people seem to be resigned to raking and treat it like doing the washing up. For others, leaves are the spawn of Satan. I can clearly picture the look of malicious hatred on the face of one woman as she bashed and dragged leaves out to the street.

Some people even go an extra step and, after raking the leaves into a pile, they shred them and then put the shreds into bags to throw away. It’s worth remembering which bags have the shreddies because, with no more work, they can be tipped directly onto perennial beds as a perfect winter mulch.

It’s not just townies who seem to have no idea of the value of the resources that nature provides. On the way to the Teaching Garden, I came upon a platoon of about 40 bags all lined up in column of route and ready to go. A volunteer and I cleared them, for use in the garden’s perennial beds, and the following day I realized where the leaves were coming from.

A good distance away, someone was in the middle of what I guess was about a six acre lot, raking up leaves, putting them in bags, dragging the filled bags uphill to the house, and then down a long driveway and across the road for collection. All told, I picked up almost five dozen bags from that location. Soon after, I noticed that the area that had been raked had now been given the once over with a riding mower.

How can anyone be so wasteful and so ignorant? If the mower had just been run over the leaves where they had fallen in the grass, that would have been the end of the matter.

Before leaves fall, the tree draws out almost all the liquid so that what lands on the ground is mostly air surrounded by very thin cell walls. Rub a dry fallen leaf between your hands and it will collapse into dust. A bag of dry leaves weighs almost nothing and, even if the leaves are shredded and compacted, it is likely still possible for someone to pick up the bag with one hand.

At the teaching garden we took a 12' length of wire fence, tied the ends together to form a 4' diameter tube, and filled it with leaves. With a bit of jumping up and down, that one ‘leaf clamp’ took 35 bags of leaves to fill. 35 bags is 2 to 3 times the number that anyone on my street can produce and it is all contained in a volume four feet in diameter by four feet high. The 55 bags from the country lot, plus at least as many again, went into a clamp about 8' long by about 5' wide. Come spring, when the leaves have settled and start to rot a bit, both containers will be half empty.

All the raking, and bagging and hauling and sweating, really achieves nothing more than having large heavy trucks move a lot of bags of air around the municipality at no inconsiderable cost to tax payers.

Several years ago, the Region stopped picking up the grass clippings that foolish people had raked off their lawns. There was a lot of hollering but the world didn’t come to an end, and today, people who still remove clippings after mowing are looked at as if they are close to certifiable.

It is now high time for the Region to stop wasting tax money and to stop picking up leaves altogether from areas where residential lots are big enough to easily accommodate composting on site. If councilors don’t have the stomach for the inevitable shrieking, then, as an interim measure, bagged leaves should only be picked up if they carry a pre-paid sticker. $5.00 a tag should be about right.

If you want to learn how to avoid the cost and waste of gardening practices which are counter productive, consider attending the free, 2010, Peel Teaching Garden winter classes. See www.teachinggarden.org for details.

High Temperature:
Actual: 1°C rain showers .50mm Windy Wind NNW24km/h P.O.P.40%
Average: 5°C
Record: 19°C in 1990

Low Temperature:
Actual: -5°C mostly cloudy Wind WNW27km/h P.O.P.42%
Average: -3°C
Record: -12°C in 1951