Re-Leaf

photo courtesy of Spencer Greet


October 26, 2008


Leaves, leaves, leaves.

What am I going to do with all of these leaves?

I'm going to spend another fall in Pennsylvania, to paraphrase Hall and Oates, and that means another round of dealing with the fallout of an acre of deciduous trees.


Already there is an amazing amount of fall foliage covering the driveway, patio, deck, walkway and lawn; and yet, when I look up, it doesn't appear that any leaves have actually fallen. Most of them are still on the trees, towering hardwoods of eighty feet or more.



Don't get me wrong, I love the change of seasons, the cycle of life and death and rebirth that is so vividly manifest here in the Northeast. I live in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia, still rural enough that as I sit here at my computer, I can watch a buzzard wheel lazily over the hillside; a minute has passed and he has still not flapped his wings.


Fall(ing) leaves are a feast for the senses. I have already talked about the colors; they make a very satisfying crunch when you walk on them, they have that wonderful redolent fall aroma when you burn them (in a barrel, of course, no open burning in my township) and jumping into a big pile of leaves is still de rigueur for children of all ages.


But the collection and taming of the leaves - that is a consummation devoutly to be wished. I hate those ubiquitous leaf-blowers, with their particularly annoying combination of buzz and whine, and vacuuming the outdoors just seems stupid. Raking is good exercise, but kind of like emptying the ocean with a teacup, when you are stranded amid a vast sea of leaves with only a little wood and bamboo for help.


We could just let them stay where they are, of course, and try to ignore them. Until, one day, I realize that they have all blown in to my family room whenever anyone enters the house, swirling around the coffee-table every time the door opens, and then I am vacuuming leaves for real. By midwinter, they will have become a thick coating of slime on my driveway, glued to the asphalt and irremovable, and fertile ground for molds and mildews that as yet have not even been discovered or given fancy-sounding Latin names.

That solution seems to go beyond the tenets of moderation to which I now hew so closely.

Plus, if leaves are allowed to wallow on the grass all winter, they could smother it. I certainly don't want that on my conscience.

So, okay, we manage somehow to collect at least a few significant piles of leaves. What then?


The environmentally conscious thing to do would be to mulch or compost them. If we choose to compost, in theory, we would then have some fabulous material to put on our garden next year. But this is an arduous, labor-intensive project, and we are not talking about Olympian levels of get up and go here.


Mulching, on the other hand, just involves cutting the leaves into little pieces. We actually have a leaf mulcher, one of those garden objects that I bought Norm for Christmas one year even though I did not know exactly what it did. So, perhaps we will mulch the leaves.


Or, perhaps, we will just sit outside with a glass of mulled wine, on a chilly fall day, and just contemplate mulching the leaves. We will feel virtuous about the thought of mulching the leaves. We will sip our wine, and watch the buzzard circle the sky.