NA why do people bag leaves and throw them away?

Shawn said:
I thought that is what two stroke gas leaf blowers are for...to blow them into your noise sensitive climate activist environmentalist neighbor's yard...
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And it drowns out the noise from their yipper dogs.
 
In my parent's neighborhood, they would just rake them to the street and the city would come to vacuum them up. But he never did it... he used the leaves to protect the shrubs
 
My leaves are still in my yard. I’ll get to them eventually. They’ll go into my gardens.

@ArrowFlyer86 go move to a decent neighborhood, no HOAs. Or maybe even Casa De Aero!
 
Matthew said:
Leaves will collect thickly enough to choke out my grass. I bag them, the city collects them along with bagged grass clippings, then mulches and composts it and lets residents have as much as they can carry.
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When I lived in my previous house, that was the process. Now in a condo community, no clue where they go but have suffered thru the first fall of leaf blowing by the association lawn company. Again no clue where they were blown to and zero desire to know;)
 
Ted said:
Millions of years of forests would disagree with you, however the timeframe might not be to your liking.
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When's the last time you walked through a forest? They tend to be littered with Fallen trees / limbs / leaves to the point where you can't walk a straight line more than a couple paces at a time. Certainly no grass. If you want a yard like that, I agree, no need to get rid of the leaves.
 
On another note, I have a friend who's into poison dart frogs. He makes a crapload of money bagging live oak trees and selling them as bedding to other froggers.
 
Shawn said:
I thought that is what two stroke gas leaf blowers are for...to blow them into your noise sensitive climate activist environmentalist neighbor's yard...
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Here they are wielded by professional lawn care workers. From what I can tell, they mostly blow the leaves into mulched areas, and nature puts them back on the lawn within a day or two. I'm working at home and I pretty much hear them from 8 in the morning until dusk six days a week, and part of Sunday. The problem with them is that they're so damn loud you can hear them from inside your house when they're half a mile away. That, and they're not very effective.
 
Now that we live in the city, we rake up the leaves, bag them in giant paper bags, and leave them out for "yard waste" collection which is for composting. If we didn't, the dead leaves would kill the grass and create a slippery slimy hazard for people walking on our stone pathways. When my daughter was a kid, before bagging them I'd pile the leaves up next to her climbing tree so she could jump down into the leaves. Back when we lived on 25 acres of forest, we composted leaves and cut grass, and I had a Bearcat shredder I used to turn the bigger stuff into mulch.
 
I used to have large trees on my lot. Would rake them onto a blue tarp and drag them to the backyard into a mulch pile.
Then I got a commercial mower and cut them up, worked good.
Then a couple 3 years ago, I had 2 large ones cut down and one really trimmed back. It has been the best thing I have done since I moved in 39 years ago. My trees grew a lot in 39 years! I still use the mower to chop them up, but much fewer than before.

Gas blowers, I set mine on high/wide open and keep it there. Not using the throttle to open and close it which drives me crazy sound wise.
 
Gary Ward said:
Gas blowers, I set mine on high/wide open and keep it there. Not using the throttle to open and close it which drives me crazy sound wise.
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Agree with the people playing with the throttle being annoying. Even more so with chain saws. Every time I hear a crew doing that I want to walk over and ask "would you like me to teach you how to run the saw without sounding like a cartoon character?" But I don't, partly because they have chain saws and partly because I'm just chicken.
 
When I had a lawn, it was just large enough to fill one catcher bag when I mowed it. Over 15 years ago we re-landscaped and one of the things we did was eliminate the lawn. I don't even own a lawn mower anymore. :) I do rake up the leaves from a couple of the trees as they would choke out the plants in the garden. The leaves wind up in the yard waste bins and get picked up by the trash collectors. That, along with other yard chores, will probably wind up being the cause of us selling the place and moving in the future. At 71 it is getting harder and harder to deal with the yard.
 
I live in a moderately wooded area. Back 3 acres dense woods. Front 2 acres has the perimeter lined with oaks and have a few maple and hickory trees in there. Have my owntow behind leaf vac that I'll fill 8 times every week for 4-6 weeks. Way too many leaves to mulch em into the grass. But I'll bring em in the back woods and dump there.
 
Ghery said:
Over 15 years ago we re-landscaped and one of the things we did was eliminate the lawn. I don't even own a lawn mower anymore. :)
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I've been tempted to replace my lawn with permeable pavers; maybe add some Czech hedgehogs for artistic effect.
 
Racerx said:
I live in a moderately wooded area. Back 3 acres dense woods. Front 2 acres has the perimeter lined with oaks and have a few maple and hickory trees in there. Have my owntow behind leaf vac that I'll fill 8 times every week for 4-6 weeks. Way too many leaves to mulch em into the grass. But I'll bring em in the back woods and dump there.
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Which model tow-behind vac do you have? I've considered getting one for the riding mower even for my less than an acre just to make cleanup a bit easier. I've seen the Leaf Rake advertised, as well as a few Agri-Fab units.
 
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I think that leaf raking came about, like most things do, from the big advertising firms that tell us how we want to live our lives. They say that we want to live in a 3000 sqft box approximately 36 inches from our neighbors and that those boxes should be surrounded by green grass that is not naturally occurring where we live and that will require us to buy their things to force it to live there anyway. It's the American way.

That being said. I live in the "historic" downtown area of small-town America so I, too, have to deal with unsightly leaves twice a year. I choose to mulch them with my 60" zero turn. Yay, capitalism!
 
I used to set the mower blade up high, put the clippings bag on, and "mow" the leaves into the bag. Mowers are pretty good vacuums, and they chop the leaves up. Then dump.
 
The irony of a bunch of pilots complaining about others’ hobby/choices being too loud and pointless. Bagging leaves for lawn care seems no less pointless than a $200 cheeseburger run but we don’t question the latter.

If people want to maintain their lawns to look a specific way or whatever reason they chose to, let them. That’s their thing. Yours is flying. People can have different things. Why so judgmental?
 
The irony of a bunch of pilots complaining about others’ hobby/choices being too loud and pointless. Bagging leaves for lawn care seems no less pointless than a $200 cheeseburger run but we don’t question the latter.

If people want to maintain their lawns to look a specific way or whatever reason they chose to, let them. That’s their thing. Yours is flying. People can have different things. Why so judgmental?
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And that is the correct answer.
 
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AKiss20 said:
The irony of a bunch of pilots complaining about others’ hobby/choices being too loud and pointless. Bagging leaves for lawn care seems no less pointless than a $200 cheeseburger run but we don’t question the latter.

If people want to maintain their lawns to look a specific way or whatever reason they chose to, let them. That’s their thing. Yours is flying. People can have different things. Why so j
donjohnston said:
And that is the correct answer.
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The true answer is giant mufflers on leaf blowers.
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I don't think mufflers are going to help a ton. The majority of the noise from a leaf blower comes from the impeller/blower itself, not the gas engine. Sort of like propellers and aircraft engines.
 
SoonerAviator said:
I don't think mufflers are going to help a ton. The majority of the noise from a leaf blower comes from the impeller/blower itself, not the gas engine. Sort of like propellers and aircraft engines.
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Did the people complaining about the noise of yard maintenance know they were moving to an area with yards and trees, or were the yards built and trees planted after they moved in? :cool:

Nauga,
and another oxen gored
 
Gas or electric powered leaf blowers are for wimps...



Can also be used to pre-heat engines and de-ice planes...
 
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SoonerAviator said:
Which model tow-behind vac do you have? I've considered getting one for the riding mower even for my less than an acre just to make cleanup a bit easier. I've seen the Leaf Rake advertised, as well as a few Agri-Fab units.
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Agrifab. With a zero turn it didn't really work for me. So just mow leaves into about a dozen large piles and tow the vac with the atv to the piles. This was local for me as well. No real complaints other than dumping. Arse end is to close to the ground to help in any meaningful way. I don't bother dumping and just get a steel rake to pull it out. Only takes a couple minutes when it's full.

I think they all work as designed. They suck. Been thinking of getting a mid mount mower for the Honda Tractor and towing the vac with that.
 
PaulS said:
I do have a lawn guy who does it sometimes, he had a 13 hp little wonder push blower.
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I had one of those beasts. I bought it in partnership with a neighbor.

One cylinder, four stroke engine, starting was easy: One pull with choke full on, second pull with choke off. Bam! Bam! Bam!Bam!Bambambam etc. The first several Bams were ground shaking and loud. At higher revolutions, the engine noise subsided but then the fan noise replaced it. All together a hellacious loud machine. At full howl the machine would lift the turf...

But it did clear away the leaves. I was tending a four acre lot (less area for house driveway and garage) set into the woods so yes I needed a leaf blower on steroids...

-Skip
 
During my career in local TV, I moved quite a few times. My present house and the previous two had an area of woods beyond the back yard, so I have been blowing leaves for years. My neighbors in this village bag leaves and haul them to a yard waste site, where they are composted and free for gardeners in the following years. In the neighboring city, residents rake or blow leaves to the curb and the city vacuums them up.

I am not aware of anyone around here intentionally ignoring the leaves that fall on the lawn, but I do see some mulching over and over rather than removing the whole leaves.

I once read "There is a war between trees and grass in America, and humankind is on the side of the grass."
 
Racerx said:
Agrifab. With a zero turn it didn't really work for me. So just mow leaves into about a dozen large piles and tow the vac with the atv to the piles. This was local for me as well. No real complaints other than dumping. Arse end is to close to the ground to help in any meaningful way. I don't bother dumping and just get a steel rake to pull it out. Only takes a couple minutes when it's full.

I think they all work as designed. They suck. Been thinking of getting a mid mount mower for the Honda Tractor and towing the vac with that.
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My Kubota mower should tow one pretty well. The main difference with Leaf Rake vs AgriFab is the ability to collapse the Leaf Rake for more compact storage in the off-season, but it's still not going to save that much space. AgriFab is probably less frustrating to dump do to having the rigid container vs the fabric. Either way I'm sure it would be preferable for me to run it once or twice a week during the fall to keep the clean-up manageable vs waiting until I have 50 containers-worth of dumping to do, lol.

You have many issues with clogging?
 
The house I lived in in Virginia for 23 years backed up to 90 acres of woodland. We just blew the leaves back into the forest from where they came. We do a similar thing on my two acres on NC26. About half the property is still wooded.
 
SoonerAviator said:
My Kubota mower should tow one pretty well. The main difference with Leaf Rake vs AgriFab is the ability to collapse the Leaf Rake for more compact storage in the off-season, but it's still not going to save that much space. AgriFab is probably less frustrating to dump do to having the rigid container vs the fabric. Either way I'm sure it would be preferable for me to run it once or twice a week during the fall to keep the clean-up manageable vs waiting until I have 50 containers-worth of dumping to do, lol.

You have many issues with clogging?
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Only clogging I've had is when I get em into piles and it rains before I get em sucked up. Even then its just at the nozzle and 2 seconds to clear by hand. With it hooked up directly to a mower I don't think you'd have a clogging problem....unless you're working in the rain.
 
Winter is always a stress inducer for leaves. We have big trees and lots of leaves in the back yard, and it usually takes until March to clear them out. You can only fit so many in the green waste bin plus there are a lot of rainy no leaf cleanup days. I like trees but I am hating the maintenance more and more.
 
Sac Arrow said:
Winter is always a stress inducer for leaves. We have big trees and lots of leaves in the back yard, and it usually takes until March to clear them out. You can only fit so many in the green waste bin plus there are a lot of rainy no leaf cleanup days. I like trees but I am hating the maintenance more and more.
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When I lived in NC I had a big yard with some trees - and seasonal leaf accumulation. I just mulched them with my riding mower - which worked well for me. About the only difference from cutting the grass
was that some areas would need a couple of passes.

Dave
 
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