You know, I try. I recycle whatever I can, I compost much of my kitchen waste, I buy things with the minimum of packaging. I don't even bag my grass clippings, even though that means I spend all summer sweeping them up off the floor in my house. And yet every fall, my yard looks like this on garbage day:
That's 44 bags of leaves - this week. Last week it was 26, the week before was 13. And the trees are maybe 1/2 or 2/3rds of the way empty.
I don't know how to do any better. The bags are made from recycled plastic, and I use the paper ones for everything except what we use when we bag the mower output. I've even composted three or four bags of leaves, and tried running them over with the mower and just leaving them on the lawn. But when your upwind neighbor has 19 mature oak trees in her backyard, the volume is just too much to deal with and still expect to have a usable yard. I wish there were some more elegant way to handle it, but we'd literally have a compost pile the size of a barn if we tried to handle all of it ourselves - and straight oak leaves take forever to decompose, so we'd end up with a new barn-sized pile every year.
Anyone have a workable solution that doesn't involve turning my entire backyard into a compost factory (or taking a chainsaw to my neighbor's trees)?
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