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50 Comments
What a lovely and helpful video 😊
It’s nice to see the dogs being useful. My friend’s Pomeranian is a master of smelly things and their chief composter.
Then in the spring they will cry about fertilizer
You can also use leaves as a mulch and anchor them in place by scattering some woodchip mulch on top.
"Leaf bag TV" lol
theres a company that makes big bags for lawn mowers they work great with leaves
Nice haul 👍. My neighbor brings me several bags a week & during summer the cut grass🤩. Living in sand I feel so blessed 😇 Winds are 20+💨 Glad I didn’t put them out yet 😉. 👵🏻👩🌾❣️
If only we had more deciduous trees here in Australia – I would love to go out and collect leaf bags!!
Such a coincidence. I spent the afternoon with my mower, picking up the oak leaves that have fallen from my neighbors tree. I used the shredded leaves to mulch two large beds that I am starting in preparation for a small poly tunnel that I will install in the Spring. This technique works very well. I have a small enough garden that the local leaves from maple and oak trees that blow onto my yard is sufficient for mulching my few beds. Great to put the resource to use.
Who doesn't love
a leaf pile?
Not in a town, but I've been collecting leaves from my property and adding them to the chicken yard.
I noticed that the chickens pick out the locust leaves to eat, even dry.
In my community, people have to drive leaves to the local dump which is about 10 km away and only open on weekends. I put out notice that I would take them if they wanted to save the drive and I traded some small pumpkins, squash and garlic if they drop them off on the farm. It has been a huge success and I'm overwhelmed with leaves now. I use a Toro leaf blower/vacuum combo and it does a decent job at sucking them up and mulching them in the process. I bag them up and store them outside the chicken coop and put mulched leaves down as litter all winter long. The chickens love to kick them around, and eventually it will start to compost and provide some coop heat. I also do all the things you mentioned, mulching garlic beds. I also save as many bags of dry leaves as I can for the sheep, they will snack on them in the winter as a side dressing to their hay.
another good way to do it is use an inexpensive or used electric limb & leaf chipper. this allows you to take the bag and do the mulching exactly where you need it without having to double move the material. I got mine for super cheap at harbor freight but I often see used ones on Craigslist, fb marketplace etc
I bought a mini wood chipper. I can chip small branches 3" but mainly the leaves I collect around my neighborhood. I like this method as well but since I don't like cutting grass I don't have a lawnmower. I use a scythe.
I have a "Toro Super Blower Leaf Vac" that besides being a blower can be adjusted to vacuum and chop up leaves sucking them into a bag it comes with. But I must say, your mower chopping up leaves on the driveway without the bag does almost as good a job!I used to use my mower, but always used it on the grass, and like you demonstrated, it only partially chops the leaves.
Last year I stood the bags up, cut a slit down each side and laid the paper down over grass. I spread the leaves out over the bag and it seems to have worked well, except the edges and places where I didn't overlap the paper. It helped turn my grass paths into mulched paths in one year basically after a bit of covering up what I'd missed. If the leaves blow around a light layer of pine needles seems to keep things mostly in place. As a bonus to the mulch, I found a bunch of hickory seedlings growing around.
Thanks for another great video. I am getting ready to try this and was glad that you did this video, perfect timing. Thank you!
Sadly here in NC people don’t bag leaves, they rake or blow them to the side of the road where the city vacuums them up. I have plenty in my yard that I move around all over.
The lawm mower was far more effective than I expected when you first described it. I assumed it would blow away far more than it did.
However the dog rolls method is adorable.
This will be my third year collecting leaf bags after watching your videos. We start a little later here in FL, but I collect as many as I can, mulch the beds and store the rest to compost with all the green we have in the summer. I totally love going out and leaf bag hunting and have been known to make my kids jump out of the car and throw them in the back if we find something good while out and about!
Yes! I'm hoping this past weekend had the maple tree owners raking away! I am going to drive my usual route tomorrow morning. I used to mow them, but now i just pile them very deep (at least twice as high as the beds) in paths after scooping last year's onto beds. I would rake aside as mom mowed.
I used to dry and fold the bags and drop them off where I'd picked them up, but found they weren't being reused. Torn bags i use when creating new no-dig beds or chuck them into the compost bin (no chickens).
In our old suburban context with our first chickens, one of the most fun things to do was fill their run up with autumn leaves. They had a great time tearing through them finding insects and seeds and whatever, and we got loads of laughs watching chickens popping up and disappearing again through the leaves. When they were done, it was shredded fine and thoroughly mixed with high nitrogen chicken poop.
I love leaves, as much as I love wood chips. Once, I had a property with a big hole where a 5-bay garage once lived. I filled it with leaves with the help of local landscapers, and left it alone. After two years I had the loveliest soil ever!
i use my leaf blower with the vacuum setting and do a second pass once the bag gets full. might try using a lawn mower because the leaf blower gets clogged when twigs get sucked up.
I wish people where I lived would do that! Unfortunately they usually burn them
If I can get them dry, I basically do the same, plus use in chicken coop area. If they're wet, I stuff them into wire mesh hoops, and pee on them. Makes a great leaf mould.
this is what i do as well, mowing long windrows of them – I do a few passes then rake them back up. Every once in a while there's a hunk of rusty metal which is exciting, but otherwise its great.
Well timed video! Just about to start getting leaves ourselves. I appreciate the tip on shredding the leaves first!
I collect leaf bags this time of year, too. I've got an electric leaf blower/shredder vacuum with a collection bag. It works pretty well, but it's slow, awkward and heavy. I recently found a commercial attachment for my blower/shredder with a cloth end that fits over a large trash can, connected to a flexible 4" hose that is six or eight feet long. It works like a charm, and it's easy to transport the shredded leaves one can at a time to where ever I need them. I just checked and it's called a, "WORX Pro Universal Leaf Collection System." It came with an adapter that snapped right onto my blower/vac. Not sponsored, just a pleased customer.
We're making leaf mold and using it as a mulch
Leaf bag envy! We sneak leaves from certain public spots in Autumn,… We have quite a few sycamores at ours. We use the sycamore leaves around plants to suppress grass, it's amazing, works so well.
The Mighty Mac hammermill I have really turns leaves into mulch efficiently, allowing me to also throw-in soil, branches (3-4" in the chipper side), rocks (by accident). Something you should check out getting (my model is the 12P by MacKissic).
Back at it again. I shred with my electric mower just like that. The leaves are going on open garden beds and under/around cardboard/compost for new native seed sown beds. And of course some get tossed in for the chickens to pick through. I also use the bags to build wind breaks for the chicken run and little greenhouse.
My favorite time of year!
This came at just the right time. I was considering purchasing a chipper/shredder but now realize I can just use my electric mower. Thank you for helping me think outside the box!
Our leaves have not yet fallen, but when they do I will be out picking up leaf bags for mulch and composting! The fennel arrived and is planted! Thank you, Lovely Folks!
i found out that using the lawn mower without the bag is the best way to shredding the leaves and then just collect the small pieces and make a pile…let them get wet and then use it later on…
Got first load of leaf bags yesterday and we got wood chips today. Makes me happy!
We have been driving into a sidewalk neighboorhood with a lot of mature trees and thus a ton of leaf bags! They actually have a service that sucks the leaves up directly off the curb, as long as the homeowners rake them out there, but a lot of people still bag.
We collect the bags, empty them out at home for a leaf mold compost project, and then take the empty bags back to the houses we got them from when we go back the next week. Since those bags cost money, returning them dry and folded to their original homes encourages the people to keep baging instead of just raking to the curb
My local City has mountains of leaves they pile up in downtown.I've already got 15 truck loads this year. But what sucks is I'm the only one getting it I think maybe a couple other people. . I've been using it as mulch and in my compost and I'm loving it. This is my second year using it. I also have access to wood chips too but I'd rather have the leaves. I give them about 6 months after they've been sitting then I start going to get loads . They are dark brown and real moist and actually look really good like a brown mulchi. It's super easy to spread it. This year we had a bad drought,no rain and the leaves I used a mulch dried out and started moving a lot compared to last season (no drought).. .
I’m very lucky to have a lot of mature maples around my property. I shred the leaves and use them as bedding for my chickens. Not only is it free but the chickens absolutely love scratching around whenever I dump a fresh bag for them. Then that bedding mixed with the chickens waste makes a wonderful compost that ends up fertilizing the garden.
Oh buddy, my wife calls me the Leaf Burglar…never know when I'm gunna roll into town with my trailer to get the jump on unassuming residential bagged leaves lols
the ole two-dogpower leaf shredder
You can use full leaf bags as winter insulation along the edges of a greenhouse or poly tunnel, then compost in the spring. You can also shred and soak the leaves, then set up a Johnson-Su bioreactor in a tunnel or greenhouse.
I'm glad I no longer have to collect external sources of compost, I only need 250 gallons of finished compost each year and that is produced by our garden waste and kitchen scraps. Family was not amused: now they have to bring their garden waste to the county green waste processing facility. I only amend my compost with small amounts of charcoal, bentonite clay and crushed basalt. It seems I'm a white raven in compost land, but I'm no longer expanding my number of no-dig raised beds, and I started harvesting weeds, letting them rot down during 5 weeks and use the diluted smelly water for additional feeding and watering. I never understood why people get rid of their leaves. Once I came across an allotment on our ornamental garden community that had scraped their garden down to almost ground water level during 40 yrs, the new one on that plot had a lot wheelbarrowing to do in order to get the plot back a normal level
You rock. Thank you for encouraging folks to take advantage of the windfall this time of year!!!
I can honestly say that where I live in California, I've never seen bagged leaves. I didn't even know that was a thing (possibly because we have yard waste cans that are picked up weekly), but I do see leaves piled on the sidewalks for yard waste pickup during the fall and winter so last year was the first time that I actually bagged other peoples leaves for my garden.
I put them in plastic bags that had some holes on the bottom and when I went to use them, they were already filled with worms.
i'm using an electric mower to build a styrofoam shredder, which will work awesome for this
that's a nice haul