You betcha. I've been out this morning stuffing the compost bins with wild abandonment. Gotta get a lot of 'em to get anything out of it. What you need is a nice BIG pile of leaves and add them to the bins as they shrink. Shredding them really gets 'em going nicely. Enjoy the harvest.

"stuffing the compost bins with wild abandonment"

Is wild abandonment a green or a brown?..

(sorry, couldn't resist, must be intoxicated by the smell of autumn air!)

I plan on scavenging the 'hood as soon as people rak'em up and bag them for curbside pick up....by me! I even found a few nice bags of pine straw, ready for the beds. How nice of my neighbors!

This year, I'm getting them delivered to me by a lawn service. I've received 2 dump truck loads already !

For years I've watched the falling leaves and cringed thinking of the task of raking and bagging. Now I just look up and smile while my free compost and mulch gently floats down into my yard.

Glad to see I am not the only one excited about the prospect of going curbside leaf pilfering. Struck gold the other day scoring about 8 bags of pine needles!
I don't use the pine needles in my compost bin but I have found that I really like mulching with them.

It's just nice to know there are other nuts out there like me;)

Our leaves just started to fall. I first mulch all my planting beds with them, sometimes using them mixed with grass clippings. When all beds are covered and put to bed for winter, I start hoarding the leaves for next year's composting.

Several of my neighbors now deliver their bagged leaves to me so I don't even have to steal them. I just find giant bags of leaves in my driveway occasionally. Works for me.

Have to get busy with the mulching now. I still have most of my flowers in the ground, waiting for seeds to mature out there.

Karen

I just hit the jackpot. I moved into a cul de sac near my old house. Last night one of the other houses in the circle had an informal gathering. Leaves came up in conversation so I shifted into compost mode. The lady next to me said "You use compost?" She has a compost pile she's been building AND TURNING for NINE YEARS that she'd love to have hauled away. Guess who's volunteering. I just have to rolll the wheel barrow across our little street.

Martha

Martha: Wow! that is quite a jackpot. Why doesn't this crazy lady want her compost?

Karen

mmmm...makes me wonder what she's been composting?

I'm especially excited this fall because I bought a second-hand electric leaf shredder that I used a bit last spring, but not for a whole harvest. Works very well!

I filled my car TWICE with a total of 17 leaf bags today. The dry leaves and pine needles went on the garden as mulch, the leaf bags (OPLB) were used to smother the stupid trees that sprout from the stupid berries that drop on the ground (the last of which I cut down today) and the bags of grass/leaves combined went into a new compost bin. They were already heating up! yeah!

I've never been so excited about leaves until coming here. Used to bag them up and set them by the roadside for the town crews to pick up, giving compost away essentially. :-)

Now the only thing we put by the side of the road is bagged up spruce needles and cones, since I don't want to deal with composting them.

So now I'm looking for greens and not getting enough from mowing the weeds on my lawn to match the piles of leaves. I immediately tried to stop the insane thought of mowing the neighbors' lawns to get those greens. But that thought won't go away. :-)

Can you picture someone surreptitiously sneaking into their neighbors' yards while they're at work and mowing their lawns for them?

Is there a 12-step intervention program for people like us?

Well, my neighbors are not surprised when they come home and find me raking or vacuuming leaves from their lawn. Seems like a nice gesture once in a while.

The leaf fairy came today for the first time this year. I found a giant bag of shredded leaves leaning against my porch. From my neighbor Ken, no doubt, judging by the clear bag. Jim, my next door neighbor, just dumps his leaf vac into the garbage cans beside my house for just that purpose. I have great neighbors!

Karen

LOL! The crazy lady who doesn't use compost is a true compost purist. I did that one year as a stress reliever. It was immense fun! Studying for oral boards, working full time, two toddler sons -- no garden! A horse-ing friend had old year old hay to clear out for new bales at haying time, a bit moldy, and I got 20 to build the walls of my pile. I spent many happy hours 'on a break', scavenging for pile food and the whole hospital was in on it. Coffee grounds and filters, as much shredded paper as I wanted, left over veges from the cafeteria I collected, and then sacks of overgrown zucchinis showed up at my locker. People stared at me a bit, raking leaves on the front campus lawn.
I drove out for one person's old corn stalks which I cut from his garden for standing in the middle to keep air channels, and to another's grandfather to harvest his rabbit poop. He thought I was nuts! I got a couple of really 'nasty' down pillows and an old sour down comforter, and then I put old tobacco stalks through my chipper shredder(I didn't know nicotine was an herbicide...) and made myself sick and dizzy from breathing the dust. I collected human hair from my local stylist. Part of the game -- 1. Everything free 2. As many ingredients as possible.

"Oh, I think I need a break...I think I'll get my bucket and take a stroll through the cow field next door and look for a nice pat or two." I did that more times than I can remember, with little boys in tow. Oh! And we collected hedgeapples, too, and the abandoned eggs from my chickens.

Two years later when nothing was recognizable and the hay walls long turned in, we moved. I never used it, but man, I bet somebody did!

I miss those cows. I miss my chickens. I miss my creek. I miss my big ol' barn. I think I'm going to cry! Whew, and talk about memory, I'm a little queasy just remembering the tobacco stalk fiasco.

Wow, Petalpatsy, I bet you do miss all that. I hope the value of your old homestead increased as a result of "gifting" beautiful compost.

Btw, tomatoes, eggplants, and potatos also contain good amounts of nicotine. Not as much as tobacco, but if you consume enough of them, you'll test positive for small amounts of cotinene, the byproduct of consuming nicotine.

I thought that nic was somewhat of an insecticide, but not an herbicide. Now I'll have to go look that up.

Anyhoo, you sure had a busy life. I remember those days of toddlers and budgets and trying to do productive stuff and wondering how I ever got through it all. But then, it also causes a rush of nostalgia. It sure sounds like it was a lot of fun.

Pass the kleenex, please.

Petalpatsy - and I thought I was busy! Great memories - and I bet you're still creating great memories now just in a different season/place.

And, btw, can we back up to mommyandme's post - how Resourceful!!! Has anyone else gotten a lawn service to do this? What did you do w/2 truckloads??!! Do share :) . . .

Hi! The truckload story is rather funny. In previous years, we used to steal bags & bags of grass, leaves & misc. yard waste on a year round basis. My car only holds 6 or 7 bags at a time and this was exhausting. Last year, midway thru leaf season, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, but kept up with the leaf stealing anyhow because we decided to build raised beds & fill them with lasagna to make things easier for me. Once the beds were filled, I cut back a bit on my scavenging. Early this fall, my next-door neighbor had extensive work done on his trees. My daughter casualy asked the guys if they were going to chip all those limbs (no chipper machine was in sight). They replied that they couldn't chip today because the truck was full of grass. They were going to come back tomorrow afternoon. We solved their problem. We took the dump truck full of grass. Then they went & got the chipper & shot the chips over the stone wall from my neighbor's yard into ours. They were thrilled. They claim they have to pay a $50 per truckload dumping fee if they can't convince the homeowner to keep their own stuff. I have 1100 sq feet of 15" high vegetable beds filled with lasagne, a flower bed about the length of 4 cars & about 4 feet wide, a couple of much smaller flower beds, and 3 shrub borders. I "disposed" of the grass & the wood chips in only 2 days. Yesterday, I got another truckload of leaves & grass and a promise of another truckload of wood chips coming soon. In addition to mulching every shrub in sight, I'm using the wood chips to make thick paths between my veggie beds. Getting this stuff delivered is much, much easier on my poor aching body.

awesome, just awesomely inspiring :)

The suburbs east of us dont need to use leaf bags. They rake their stuff onto the curb and thsi GIGANTIC leaf sucking truck comes by and vacuums everything up. Its HUGE!

So I went there with a supply of leaf bags and found piles that had grass clippings and leaves and filled up my car twice for a total of 12 bags.

kewl, huh? You get to PICK what you want.

:)

Fibro and a gardening leaf thief, I'm impressed. Too bad you didn't "offer" to take the grass and wood chips for only $25 a load. Woulda saved them money and bought you supper out. Win/win in my books.

Lloyd

You all have inspired me to get my compost pile going! I literally have a "pile" and have some lumber laying around to frame it in. It's on my husband's "honey-do" list but I think I'll tackle building it myself soon as we are having major leaf drop here. I'm excited about adding in some kitchen waste and reducing my weekly garbage load. I didn't realize paper was such a good composting material (duh! makes sense!) and we even have a little paper shredder to get things moving.

Doris, I asked that GIGANTIC leaf sucking truck to drop his load here . . .the leaves, grass clippings, and pine needles were already somewhat shredded, still it took all day to distribute them where I wanted them. What a fun job! My bins are cooking.

{{gwi:311180}}

Maryann: Now isn't that better than dragging it home by the bag? Great Score!

And a certain amount of incentive. Must get those woodchips gone before I can drive the car out of the driveway! Isn't it satisfying to have huge piles of free stuff?? I still have woodchips up in a field and am trying to find the time/energy to get them spread where I want them. Perhaps I should have put them just outsideof our garage!

I've brought home a few loads over the last two weeks. I plan on making a rather large compost pile this year. About 10 feet in diameter and three/four feet tall. I love it.
My wife hates me bringing stuff home. Hates it. I backed the truck in the driveway yesterday full o' goodies. You'da thought I had a couple of hookers in the front seat with me the way she came out the front door. Fast walking up to the truck demanding to know what I planned on doing with "that stuff". I have been clearing out around trees and shrubs so as to have all my beds ready for the leaves before I get home with them so I can 'hide' them quickly. I also am trying to minimize the profile of the copost pile so she won't realize just how big it is. She can get mad all she wants though, I swear my yard did much better this year due to the leaves I mowed in last fall. I'm definitly doing that again. And everything I started composting last fall is looking good now. I am surprised at just how long it takes. I thought that in Florida it would move along faster. Oh well, I have some to work with now and will get even more gong for next year.
Yay fall.

Things might compost a bit quicker here in FL but if your primary ingredient is oak leaves, they still take a long time. I've noticed that some of my old compost piles that were just left at my vacant lot to mature now look like a small pile of oak leaves with some dirt mixed in. I wouldn't wait to use the pile till the oak leaves are completely unrecognisable or you won't have anything left. I let my piles age for 8 months to a year before using them. (I don't turn my piles except to stir them when adding new ingredients or when getting ready to use it.)

Anyway, here in FL we might not have the frozen season to stop the composting but we do have a very dry season which might slow things down and then we have an overly wet season that can slow things down. Keeping the right moisture balance can be tricky here.