The first few years I collected leaves I used my lawn mower to shred the leaves and became very efficient at it. But I because wiser with age I suppose and realized that by being more selective in my routes I could actually collect other people's shredded leaves. I don't recall actually shredding leaves last year, if I did it was very few. I have already done one batch this year, but that was just because my neighbor had a lovely pile of maple and Sycamore leaves across the street(they shred much easier than my oak leaves). It became easy to tell which bags had shredded leaves and which ones were whole, just by the weight and feel of the bags. Then I would find huge piles by the road that had been shredded with mowers. Some of the high powered commercial mowers do a marvelous job of shredding leaves, much better than I can do with several passes over them. Plus a truck load of shredded leaves will be at least multiple times the load compare to unshredded ones. I do collect unshredded leaves when a pile really appeals to me, but I use that in the path ways when just working back and forth on them helps to break them down and keep them in place, plus I want them to actually last longer in the paths.
