How can someone who has to support a family live on $15.00/hr ?

The landscaper says he will do more than cleaning leaves. He is also
going to do trimming. I guess its not worth it for him to cart all his
equiptment to my property without making a days pay. I realize this
is unskilled labor, but I hate spending weekend after weekend raking
and blowing leaves.

Also, I recently met with an accident in my yard using a Sears
Craftsman gas powered mulcher. The leaves gathered around the muffler
and the thing burst into flames. Total loss.


Therefore, for $300 someone else can do this work in a short time.

We'll see how it coems out. I will post after Wednesday and report on
how the job came out.

M



On Mon, 02 May 2005 07:51:57 GMT, "Snooze" wrote:

"msterspy" wrote in message
.. .
I live in the Boston area and I have about 5 oak trees and two pines.
I get a lot of leaves and I recently contracted a guy to move all of
the leaves to the rear corner of the yard. $300 for probably 1/2 day
work. Everything is expensive in the Boston area. Anyway, it would be
very costly to have the leaves carted off to the dump. The yard slopes
away form the house and it would be cost a lot more to remove the
pile.
I would like to add something like lime to speed up the decompostion.
Is this a good plan? Is there any other beter way to speed up the
proceess. There will be a huge pile of leaves and it builds up every
year.


Unless he's renting some fairly pricy equipment, it's probably cheaper to
hire a plumber or electrician to do that work.
$300 / 4hrs = $75/hr
I couldn't see paying more then $15/hr for this kind of work. You can add
nitrogen to speed up the decomposition, a 50 lb bag of blood meal out in
California is about $30. Sprinkle a bit on the pile as you add new leaves.

If you're paying someone $300 to pile up the leaves, I can't help but wonder
what you intend to do with the compost afterwards, which will be a mound
about 1/4 - 1/3 the size of the original pile. Somehow you'll need to spread
that back out.

-S