Whose leaf is it anyway?
You’ve dutifully raked your lawn and bagged the leavings at the curb. So now where do they go? And does anything divide the many from the few quite as deeply as the annual leaf-raking chore? Kenneth Kidd digs around and finds answers, sweat and spider bit
rina had just moved
into her Scarborough
townhouse when all
those tornado- fuelled winds hit in August. Her home survived just fine, as did the maple tree on her front lawn. There was, however, one problem, insignificant to her but apparently monstrous to others: A lot of the leaves from her tree ended up in a small drift by her neighbour’s door. The next thing she knew, said neighbour was stuffing those leaves into plastic bags — and then carting the bags over to Irina’s front lawn.
“ It was funny to see that,” says Irina, who didn’t want her last name used, lest it incite any neighbourhood hostilities. “People, they don’t think, I guess. It’s leaves! What can I do, it’s nature.” And no, she doesn’t mind the cleanup — “ It’s not a big job, not a big deal” — but she is wondering what the neighbours might get up to next, what with the big autumnal shed now in full swing.
Leaves, leaves and more leaves, all dancing in the breeze until they fall, exhausted, onto a lawn near you. Or, depending on your ( regrettable) point of view, heaps of #*%+ cluttering up the joint. Does anything divide the many from the few — or show our true nature — quite as deeply as the annual leaf- raking chore?
Just about every neighbourhood has someone who seems to catch every stray leaf before it hits their lawn, a testament to the clenched personality for which old Toronto was long notorious. These people are not true gardeners, of course, or at least not ones with a well- developed organic sense. The “horty” set mostly adores the leaves of fall, and members of that tribe are pretty easy to spot this time of year. They’re the ones carefully piling leaves on their flowerbeds as winter mulch, running the lawn mower over those left on the grass and composting the rest.
“ I love the colours,” says Gail Malcolm, a professional gardener tending a much- forested lot in the Kingsway. “ We’re dealing with the leaves every day and taking out the annuals.” She holds out a nearly pristine bunch of pink roses she has clipped from one bed. “ The last roses of summer,” she smiles. Some, like renowned Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf,
Ican even wax mystical about death, decay, and the endless circle of falling leaves feeding the next generation of growth. As he writes in one of his books: “ Acceptance of death is an important part of developing a relationship in the garden, and decaying leaves have a role, and even sometimes a beauty of their own.”
All of which may seem a bit much as you schlep your 20th kraft paper bag of leaves to the curb sometime later today, which is what most people end up doing. But if you think you have a lot of leaves, consider the metropolis at large. “ Last week we collected 4,000 tonnes, so it’s starting,” says Steve Whitter, director of transfer, processing and disposal services at the City of Toronto. The next few weeks, in fact, will see the city collect more than one- third of all the yard waste it collects in an entire year, peaking at somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 tonnes a week. But it depends on the weather. Rain followed by winds — the weather we had last week — is usually a good recipe for big piles of leaves, although they won’t make it to the curb if the weather stays crummy.
“ It has to be followed by a couple of decent days so people can clean them up,” says Whitter. “ If it’s a nice weekend, then we’ll see bags and bags and bags of them at the curb.” Which is where a logistical stutter step comes in. A single dump truck can carry only 8 to 10 tonnes of leaves, wet ones accounting for the heavier loads. So the leaves end up getting transferred to much bigger vehicles that can cart anywhere from 25 to 30 tonnes out to one of four composting sites around the province. “ We took 30 loads out yesterday,” Whitter was saying on a recent morning. “ That will grow, of course.” And no more so than at George White’s composting operation near Arthur, Ont., about an hour and half northwest of Toronto, which is where a lot of the city’s leaves come to die. There are so many giant piles of steaming compost here — hitting temperatures of nearly 80 degrees Celsius in their middles — that the one- time dairy farm now looks like the collection of ash heaps in The Great Gatsby. But the leaves by themselves are a little tricky to break down. Unlike general yard waste, which contains enough green stuff ( i. e. nitrogen) to speed up decomposition, leaves are mostly carbon.
“ It takes a good 12 months to break down,” says White, wheeling his SUV past a pile of nearly finished compost that stands 15 metres tall and covers two acres. By the end of this month, the big transfer trucks from the city will have made close to 1,000 visits to his farm, but it’s not always just leaves that they deliver. There are, well, surprises in some of those kraft paper bags.
“ We get barbecues, kids’ toys,” says White. “ One time we got a cylinder head from a car.”
Fortunately for White, none of those items seems to be among the stack of leaves Ursula Yanchak has going in the front yard of her home in High Park.
“ Having a corner lot is not the most ideal,” she says, surveying the three mature maples in her yard and the many neighbouring ones. “Then there’s the wind, and we’ve got a fence. It’s kind of a catchall — they’re from everybody.
“ You want to talk about sweat?” she asks. Oh, and spider bites.
Still, it’s one of her favourite chores. “ I really love it, the physicality of it.” The occasional neighbour stops by for a chat, and there’s always her bounding puppy, Arthur, for constant company. Yanchak has nothing but contempt for those who bemoan the fall cleanup, especially since the trees have for months given people oxygen, shade and now colour. “ Our city is beautiful because of the trees,” she says. “ It’s just part of the whole living experience.”
Naturally, this line of thinking has Irina wondering how her new neighbours will react when the following season hits — the one with that other substance not given to a tidy regimen.
“ Next it’s going to snow,” she says. “ Then we’ll see what happens.”