We Rake Leaves for Profit

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We tied a canvas tarp snugly over the entire load to prevent the foliage from blowing away during the ride home. And, once there, we spread a good portion of our cache on the garden and atop the compost heaps. We also put several thick layers on the henhouse floor (sending our chickens into a frenzy of scratching). The ducks and geese got regular wheelbarrow loads too.

We originally thought that the dry leaves would make excellent bedding for our goats, but the caprine inhabitants of our homestead (being goats) refused to accept that idea, and gobbled the leaves up nearly as quickly as we spread them out! So we went back to giving them the usual straw bedding, but filled their mangers with crisp, dry foliage once a day.

Of course, even after we'd let the animals have their fill of leaves there were still mounds and mounds of the material left over to use for mulching the fruit trees and berry plantings. (We saved one good-sized pile specifically for springtime potato planting.) And for the rest of the year, neither our garden nor our compost piles ever wanted for cellulose!

I'm sure that if we hadn't been paid to rake these leaves, we'd have tried to find a closer-to-home source of mulch and bedding, because we did end up doing an awful lot of driving. Still, the $60 we received for our efforts more than paid for whatever gasoline the Datsun consumed. And, on top of that, we got a year's worth of mulch, fertilizer, and bedding out of the deal!

I feel certain that when we repeat the job this year it'll be as pleasurable—and productive—as last year. Maybe more so!

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