free mulch from public spaces
by Nancy
(NW PA)
The maintenance man at our county courthouse has a big lawn to maintain and at this time of the year there are plenty of trees dropping their leaves. He has to vacuum up the fallen leaves and do something with them...he used to haul them up into the nearby woods (this is a rural area of NW PA) and dump them.
Now he hauls them to my front yard, the leaves already shredded by the vacuum device, and dumps them there. I get mulch and soil ammendment that doesn't blow away like whole leaves would. I haul said material to my back yard where they'll sit for a season or two in an out-of-the-way spot and become the nicest rotted soil ammendment I've ever found.
When I dig into the piles next spring, I'll find HUGE earthworms in the lower levels. And it's all FREE.
Doug says super idea - and in communities where folks bag their leaves and leave them on the curb, this is just gold waiting to be picked up. And yeah, I know that some municipalities frown on this but ...