Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I think we`ve been brainwashed by the lawn care industry to believe that leaves are unsightly and surely will murder your lawn. Having leaves in your yard is the same as having trash in your yard to a lot of folks.
Yeah it is funny how people in America go to great lengths to keep their lawn green and leaf free. But they never use the lawn. They never hang out on it, play on it, let the dog play on it. So the whole purpose is to have a green lawn for other people to look and admire at? I always thought this obsession of having a green perfect lawn is ridiculous.
And I agree with original post, people shouldn't be blowing all the leaves onto the street. Bag it up for compost. I am surprised local governments haven't encouraged this or even gone as far as enforcing it because it does just end up clogging drains, and then citizens pay to have these regularly cleaned out.
G'damn they run them for like a half hour straight. That's the most annoying part because I work from home. Especially when every house near you (including your backyard neighbor and all those neighbors) uses a landscaper (commercial grade blowers O M G). As a homeowner with no landscaper, I use it to blow my driveway twice a year and that's it - less than 5 minutes. FFS, do you really need to blow the lawn once a week even when there's very little leaves to begin with? The landscapers need to do it to be thorough, lest they get fired. Just annoying as all hell.
Not only that, with the constant barrage, there's no way to even keep a clean car anymore - a film of dust - there goes all the hard work (that once again I do myself). It's pretty ridiculous.
Mulch your leaves with a mower. Compost them. Use them to help other plants grow. Less lawn, more native plants. Better for insects, better for birds, better for small animals, better for larger animals, better for agricultural plants that need pollination, better for humans.
Why is that so hard for some people to understand???
There is a very good possibility that the city had an ordinance to remove all snow promptly? Cities are usually quick to tell home and business owners what they can and cannot do. That light dusting of snow is not a great example of how blowers contaminate the air we breathe. You could compare that picture, with the same snow or dust, to one with a lawn tractor making the same pass - the lawnmower or lawn tractor would produce even more dust/snow into the air.
Almost every year I have collected enough clippings and leaves to compost down to approximately one tri-axle full. That means that I start off with one very large pile of leaves - usually about ten feet tall. Not all of those leaves are ours - many blew on us from our neighbor's. I don't complain because I like the compost that we get from all of the leaves. In three or four years, after having these massive piles turned over with a backhoe and adding lime and fertilizer, we have dark rich organic soil.
Many think that doing nothing is better. You have one forest fire racing towards your house and you would think differently. I had one neighbor that caught the grass on fire and it headed towards our house. Due to the fact that we do maintain our property it was easy to stop before our house. Large piles of dead wood and tall grass and the outcome could have been much different for us and our surrounding neighbors. Our property acted as a firewall.
I don't believe in running leaf blowers continuously; but they do have a place in in our arsenal of lawn care equipment and, yes, they do make the job easy.
There is a very good possibility that the city had an ordinance to remove all snow promptly? Cities are usually quick to tell home and business owners what they can and cannot do.
It's called Lawsuits. Snow was too thin to shovel, too much time to sweep, too cold to melt. So before someone slipped and fell and sued, they decide to clean the sidewalks. Smart. It was on a little hill too so probably why as well. Not everyone does that. Some actually use salt but that gets expensive to do every time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fisheye
Almost every year I have collected enough clippings and leaves to compost down to approximately one tri-axle full. That means that I start off with one very large pile of leaves - usually about ten feet tall.
Nice! Nothing better than having and making your own organic dirt.....for free. In dry periods I end up soaking it with a hose because it does heat up a lot inside the pile.
For those who love their leaf blowers what do you do with the leaves? Do you just blow them into a pile so the next wind puts them back where they started or do you bag them and put them out with the trash? I think I remember when I lived in NC in the autumn people just raked the piles into the side of the street and the trash people took the leaves away (not sure if they had giant vacuums - all I know is they were there and then then weren't).
I know in my HOA community they just blow the stuff off the sidewalks and streets back onto the grassy area. They used to come on Thursday, now they come on Saturdays and they are here for hours. I'm laying out by the pool enjoying the sounds of the birds and WAM! here they come with those damn leaf blowers.
As for burning the leaves, no most cities don't allow that anymore although I have still seen in done in the country in NC as late as the 90's.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cdelena
If you have a large area, terrain on multiple levels, varying vegetation, and many trees using a blower to consolidate leaves so they can be picked up can be ten+ times faster than using a rake and broom. For some that have to deal with the leaves multiple times a year it is the difference in days of labor.
Blowers are sold that have a sound rating so some are not really objectionable at a reasonable distance (less sound than a gas mower) so maybe the complaints have to do with specific equipment.
I clean-up a broad area that has over 25 trees that drop at different times and it is good for me and my neighbors that I use a blower for some of the job.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmagoo
I think we`ve been brainwashed by the lawn care industry to believe that leaves are unsightly and surely will murder your lawn. Having leaves in your yard is the same as having trash in your yard to a lot of folks.
I can't believe how many people are fixated on raking their leaves and bagging them. If you do any research on lawn care, you will find that you should mulch you grass clippings and leaves back into the grass. I have a wooded lot on the edge of woods and I have not raked or bagged leaves in the 19 years I have been in this house.
Where I used to live, you could rake or blow your leaves into the street. The street department came away about once a week with a machine that vacuumed all the leaves off the street. The township had an area where the leaves were mulched and turned into compost. They gave it away to township residents. There were several issues with this approach. One, the leaves blew back into everyone's yards before they were vacuumed. Second, if they were wet on cobblestone streets, they made the road slippery. Third, with the leaves pile on the street, it became difficult to park. There were reportedly some situations where dry leaves caught on fire from a care parked on top of the dry leaves.
This is why I have always preferred to run the lawnmower over the leaves until they eventually disappear. The trick is to keep up with it and run your lawnmower at least once a week over the leaves. The other thing I will do is keep running the lawnmower as late as possible in the year. If the leaves are allowed to remain on your grass, they will kill your grass over the winter. It means I have to take my leaf blower and blow the leaves from close to the house, off the deck and sidewalks, away from shrubs and in the flower beds. Oak leaves are the worst because they are thicker and the last to fall off the trees. Some of the oak trees around here still have most of their leaves in mid-December.
I use a mulching mower, but inevitably a small amount of clippings or leaves will end up either in the street or on the sidewalks and driveways, so I use a blower to blow them back onto the lawn. (It's actually worse about this when mulching than the few times a year it grows too fast and I have to bag) I spend money and effort on fertilizer, lime, etc which goes into the grass, so I want as much of that to stay on the grass as possible so mulching is the better way to do it.
It's pretty stupid to blow them into storm drains both for the reasons above and that it will clog them quickly and I've never really seen that so I have to wonder why the OPs neighbors would do this or if this is what they are really doing.
I also changed a couple of years ago to a 40 volt Ryobi power head for all my yard tools when my 4 cycle gas one died on me. It's way quieter than the gas one was. If someone doesn't t like my choices in lawn care equipment, they are welcome to come do my yard for me.
If I were queen of the world they would be banned. It's not only their loudness but that particular type of sound is soooo grating to me. Within Los Angeles city limits the gas-powered ones are banned, I suppose due to allergy and environmental concerns, but electric ones are not. I bet half the people I see using them are violating this law. And they can used at 7am which means waking up to that godawful sound. Even if I'm wide awake they still sound terrible. Most of the time the people using them are blowing two leaves around on virtually empty pavement. They are a gigantic waste of energy and man hours, and contribute to the stress of everyone within earshot.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
