On Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:39:02 +1100, "David Hare-Scott"
wrote:

Higgs Boson wrote:
Those who don't receive Dave's Garden -- and those who do -- might
laugh (through their tears) at this calculation of the weight of
fallen leaves.

http://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/1920/

HB

This contained some new information for me, living in a land of mainly
evergreen trees I didn't imagine that there were places where leaf fall was
such a big event - assuming the estimate of a depth of 3ft is correct.
Avoiding the no-brainer, between burning and composting, I am lead to a
couple of issues.

If you have so many deciduous trees that they produce a depth of 3 feet of
leaves a season (seems doubtful but accepted for the point of discussion)
then you are living in a forest. Where there are natural forests of this
kind do people head out every weekend in the season to rake up the forest
floor lest it look messy or kill the grass? Processing 100 tons a year (if
true) is just absurd. Methinks the core of the problem is that they love
their lawn and the idea of an artificial cleared park too much.

If a gardener has way too much work to do then they suffer one of two
conditions: they take on too much or they suffer from terminal neatness.
The author appears unfortunately to have both diseases at once.

Secondly I found the repeated detailed explanation, with formulae, tables
(and a video!!!!), of how to estimate your volume of leaves amazing. Is the
education system in the USA so poor that such sophisticated computations are
dangerous territory for many of the population?

Tell me this was all a joke.

Probably serious, seriously stupid. I have large lawn areas with
several large trees and large forest areas with lots of trees. I
never ever rake leaves. The leaves in the forest are free to do their
own thing. The leaves on my lawn early on mostly blow away and the
few that accumulate under trees get taken care of with my last mowing,
I have mulching blades. Come spring after the snow melts there are no
leaves, they have all blown away and/or decayed. I've never seen
leaves accumulating feet deep, more like a couple inches the most due
to rain holding them plastered down, once they dry they blow away,
where to, into the forest of course. In some areas leaves accumulate
on the lawn at the very edge of the forest (depends on wind
direction), after winter they get taken care of with the first mowing.
Mulching blades are your friend, I never collect grass clippings
either. The closest I come to raking leaves is very occasionally
(once, maybe twice a year) I use a leaf blower on my driveway to blow
spruce needles and cones back under the adjacent Norway spruce
windbreak... and in spsring I use the leaf blower to blow teh
accumulated with road grit from salt and sand from the foot of my
blacktop driveway back into the road... I do that early, before the
town sends the street sweeping machines out. I suppose if someone
lives on a small surburban lot surrounded by fence leaves can
accumulate, but I once lived that way and still I used a riding mower
with mulching blades, within an hour there were no leaves on my
quarter acre.