Disappearing Leaves

We had been trying to wait until the trees in our yard drop all their leaves before raking them up. Unfortunately, that's taking forever, and we needed to clean up the mess sooner. Some of our neighbors had been out raking leaves a few weeks ago. It seemed like the leaves were blowing off our property and contaminating the other clean lawns all around us. I felt like the neighborhood was eyeballing us because we were "those people." Those people who never maintain their yard. That's not true, though. We do try to take care of the yard.

The weather was nice today so I decided to suck it up and do some yard work. The extended weather forecast said that the only other nice day in the near future was Wednesday, and I needed that day to put up the Christmas lights. So today was the day. The only problem was that I'd be using huge plastic garbage bags and sending a bunch of leaves to the dump. Not very green. There are some bags out there that don't use as much (or any) plastic and that biodegrade, so I had wanted to investigate those and hopefully use them. But convenience and laziness won over today. I really didn't want to be raking leaves in freezing weather. I had to use what I had on hand, which was black plastic bags.

When I was living in Denver, they had a program where you could drop off your leaves at a designated site, and they would be used for mulch or something. The yard I had at that house wasn't very big, but it did have a few huge trees. I ended up with 30+ bags of leaves that fall. I used plastic bags then too, but at least the leaves were used for something. Now that we're in Aurora I can't find anything similar here. Denver is pretty close, but that program is only for Denver residents. So we're setting out the bags of leaves on the curb and they'll disappear. That's good enough for a lot of people, but I still feel bad about sending leaves and more plastic bags to the dump. There are only four bags of leaves this time, but that's four too many. I'm not sure what else to do with them, though. Maybe at some point we'll have a compost heap going, but right now we don't. We're pretty busy this fall so I haven't had the time to find a creative solution. The wrong thing to do for the environment is so much easier to do than the right thing. I wish that wasn't the case.

This post doesn't really have any positive solutions but I thought I'd share my thoughts anyway. Four bags of leaves isn't that much, but there are so many people around that four turns into four million pretty easily. I don't like throwing out anything, especially if it could be used for something else. Hopefully Aurora will start a leaf collection similar to Denver and some of the other surrounding communities. Or maybe I should start thinking about it earlier next year, and figure out the "right" way to make the leaves disappear.