Leaves again

my compost bins are recycled ... plastics. Had them for about 15 years - moved from the UK with us, originally for a tenner from Leicester Council.

Yes but sadly not plastic compost.

ah well, now we can have plastic lawns, perhaps we could have plastic trees too ...

When DH has finished making my cold frame, ie when the dressing comes off his cut finger (another story) I want him to make me a leaf mould bin. It's so simple....just a few fence posts and some chicken wire. I think this is something like my fifteenth year of requesting one.

I usually do the black bag thing as well.

Plastic hands - just what I need!!!!

in the olden days, people used to have more bonfires and burn them .

I have a pair of enormous green plastic hands from wilco. Brilliant !

Time!

Jelly

As well as leaves we get pesky crab apples.

We always hope for strong winds to blow them away down the lane!

J52 2 huge silver birches here, and the seeds! worse than the leaves by far.

We just sweep the leaves from the grass on to the flower bed, yes, I know you are not supposed to do that, and they will blow out again, but they also provide a blanket for the bed and prevent weeds springing up early in the spring. Can't do it too often, we have a lot of leaves, so these are put in the corner of the garden and left to rot down. Lovely.

For the first time in over 20 years we are leaf free! Hurrah!

The 6 silver birches were the main culprits, I know what you mean about the seeds Alima. People used to wonder why we had the sun umbrella up in Autumn - to keep the seeds out of our cup of tea!

We used to mow them up, with the mower set on high. There are only so many bags of leaf mold a person can use.

This year the little brown seed thingies from our silver birch have been drowning us. They are more of a nuisance than the leaves. The tree is being felled next week, problem solved!

We have a dozen trees leaning over our wall which means we get about 50 big bags of leaves and this year seems worse than ever. I cant have that many bags sitting around all winter and I don't have many flower beds to compost. So it means a few trips to the tip. Picking them up is back breaking. Was going to have a go today but unexpected visitor means I have to sort out spare room and cook instead ?

On a walk recently I came back with a pocket full of lovely coloured maple leaves that I intended to paint. They are currently curling up on the draining board in the utility room! We don't get a lot of leaves in our garden as it is bounded by evergreen shrubs, but the ones that cause me the most angst are those that fall in large numbers from a huge laurel on the other side of our boundary wall (note the use of the word 'boundary' here) all over our flower beds. They are a pain to clear up and never seem to stop falling from about August through to April. This laurel is so high now that DH hasn't a hope of tackling it, and it seems that, after much tooing and froing with the council, that they do not consider the wall to be our boundary so we are responsible for what grows behind it!! We are going, at great expense, to have it taken down. I will be glad to see the back of it (and the s*****g council!). Sorry - a rant!

I get all the leaves from other people's birches, especially if the wind is from the south-west. One year, we had a north-easterly gale when the leaves were ready to fall and someone else got all the leaves. Just now there seems to be an easterly airstream, so here's hoping it lasts.

When I had a garden and a street full of leaves I used to collect them in black bags and put them under the trees in the garden or on the compost heap. Any remaining leaves I swept into the gutter for the road sweeper vehicle.

If you put them in black bags over Winter then you can use them as mulch in the Spring. I do leave a large pile at the top of the garden thats undisturbed till Spring for anything that wants to use it for shelter.