Bag Lady Strikes Again

Every year about this time I turn into the bag lady. I scour my neighbor's trash for their leaves. Well scouring the neighborhood isn't all that hard since our town composts leaves. Everyone has to put them in a nice big compostable bag or in a bin labeled yard waste. I do have to check to see what is inside it. Any yard waste could be there. This year the worst of the bags had a whole bunch of roots and rocks in it. Ick. But most were some nice leaves.

I picked this morning to do it since trash pickup is on Mondays in our neighborhood and I was busy later on Sunday. After the storm I figured there would be a lot of neighbors with bags out. My husband came with me and jokingly ranted about our lazy neighbors that hadn't left any leaves for us. Usually I don't have to go many blocks before filling up the borrowed minivan, but this year we had to travel farther than a few blocks to get what I needed to fill in my two leaf bins. Monday morning would have been a better time to pick up leaves, but then I wouldn't have had the help of my husband.

I like collecting leaves every year. Jeavons says to grow your own carbon sources for sustainability. But in a suburban or city neighborhood, leaves are an easy carbon source that don't take any space to grow. Everyone else grows them for you and then throws them away.

This year the leaves were different. A good fraction of the leaves were green. Usually I get dead leaves, but these were blown off the trees in the storm. I found more than one bag that had started the composting effort without my help of adding a nitrogen source. I wonder if it will be warm enough for them to keep composting for a while. I did add water to some of the leaves as I emptied them from the bags. Some were dry. Some were wet. I've found they can break down in a year with all the worms I now have if I can keep the leaves wet. If they are at all dry the worms shun them and they take a couple years to break down. Typically one leaf bin is used for making compost with our kitchen waste over the year. The other just sits there waiting to turn into leaf mold. If it can do it in a year instead of two, I'm always happy. I don't have enough yard waste in my urban setting to make enough compost for the garden. I don't even have enough space to make enough leaf mold if I collected more leaves. So the faster the leaves break down the better.

Now my bins are all tidied up. The four bags that are on top help keep the leaves I've collected already from blowing away. And as the bin compacts over the next few weeks, I can empty them out. Sometimes I leave them anyway as the kitchen waste composter is on the other end and it is easier to bring a whole bag over at a time than a forkful of leaves.