Leaf Raking Party

Our neighborhood has a lot of mature trees. In the past few years, I've been developing more effective ways to move all of the leaves from our yard to the compost site. Every year I come up with a more efficient way to do it. So far I have:

1) Wet leaves are best - they compress better than dry leaves. (Dry day is ok, though.)
2) Put all leaves into the back of a pickup with a shell. Use a garden rake to push the leaves back and all the way to the top. It's truly amazing how many leaves we can get into one truckload.
3) Use a tarp to put the leaves in. Rake a LOT of leaves onto a tarp (took 4 people to lift it), then hoist the tarp up to the truck. Push the tarp with leaves in, then pull out just the tarp. Use garden rake to adjust.

Using the above technique, we do the equivalent of bagging around 30 bags of leaves in about 10 minutes.

This year, we also borrowed a trailer from Eric to increase our leaf carrying capacity. After loading up an unbelievable amount of leaves, we also grabbed bags of leaves from the neighbors. The entire process of loading and transporting the leaves took about 2.5 hours for all three houses involved. In the past, this was pretty much an all-day project for each house.