I completely abhor raking leaves. It comes from growing up in Maryland, where there are a LOT of leaves, and a LOT of wet, gooey leaves. In fact, when Bryan asked me to marry him, I said yes only on the condition that I would NEVER have to rake another leaf again. And Bryan had held true to that promise for the most part.
Except here in Colorado, we have lovely, dry, crunchy leaves. So I actually pitch in every once in a while. Every ONCE in a GREAT while.
And now we have a 5-year-old minion to do our bidding.
So the boys did a bunch of raking this weekend. And bagging. And raking. And bagging. And I yelled “woo hoo!” from the porch.
Until we had a gigantic pile of bagged leaves sitting on the front lawn. Declan was amazed at how many bags we had from our little yard. (So were we.)
All those bags of possible compost to be sent off to the landfill? I think not!
Hubby tasked me with searching the internet to figure out something better. And a two second Google search showed me that Denver Recycles has something way better.
We bring our bags to them and they grind the leaves into compost for the Spring? Brilliant idea!
As we threw our leaves on top of the massive pile of those who has come before us, we had another opportunity to talk to Declan about recycling, landfills and protecting the environment. He got to see what a difference it really makes, because here in front of us, was a huge amount of bags that would have otherwise been thrown away – but NOW were going to be made into mulch. For gardens in the Spring.
It really was a really easy way to handle our leaves and have a great teaching moment. Especially for me, who only had to do a two second internet search.
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Author: Aimee
Amber Johnson
Very timely to have previously scheduled this great post to run when the leaves are now hiding under a nice layer of snow. 🙂
Zipper
Great post, and great ideas!
Janet
Leaf raking can be a huge undertaking. I remember when my two boys were younger and we would have them rake and then of course they would jump into the pile.
Great idea on saving plastic and protecting our Earth. Wish more people were aware of the impact that plastics have on us. Some personal products that we use also have plastic in them called phythlates. They are contained in our personal items such as skin care, soaps, deoderants harisprays, etc. I make sure I use phythalte free products.
JANET IN LAKEWOOD COLORADO