Collect Curbside Fall Leaves for Free Mulch

Welcome to the Member Ideas area! This community feature is where our members can post their own ideas. These posts are unedited and not necessarily endorsed by the National Gardening Association.

Posted by @Newyorkrita on November 21, 2016

Each fall the last task to put the garden to sleep is to mulch everything with a thick blanket of fallen leaves. If you are like me, you don't have enough of your own to go on all of your beds. So, I go around my neighborhood and collect the bagged leaves put out by the curb.

This article was originally posted on October 29, 2013. It was a good gardening idea and worth seeing again, so we hope you enjoy revisiting it.

Fallen leaves make free mulch for your garden each fall. In our town, people bag those extra leaves in clear garbage bags for once a week curbside pickup. The clear bags make the leaf bags easy to distinguish from any common curbside trash.

This is my garden, all mulched with a thick carpet of free fall leaves. Put on thickly, the mulch lasts all season until it is time to add more leaves the following fall.

You could also use extra leaves for your compost pile.

Comments and Discussion
Thread Title	Last Reply	Replies
Free is good by canadanna	Feb 10, 2017 11:53 AM	30
Very good timing to re-run this article! by greene	Nov 21, 2016 6:45 PM	1
Untitled by dgyoung	Nov 2, 2013 4:44 PM	0
collecting fall leaves by poobles	Nov 2, 2013 10:15 AM	1
Shred by Anderwood	Oct 31, 2013 4:20 PM	10