Learn to Love Your Leaves

(Page 2 of 2)

October/November 2004
 
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If you shred your leaves, they’ll be easier to manage — less bulky and less prone to blow around — wherever you use them. Because shredded leaves make such a great, free mulch and garden soil amendment, and because we want to encourage everyone to recycle leaves whenever possible, we decided to try out several power tools marketed for leaf shredding. Here’s what we learned:

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Many gas or electric-powered blower/vacuums can be used to finely shred leaves. We tried five brands and thought they worked fairly well, but all were prone to clogging when they sucked in twigs. Particularly for folks with physical limitations, these tools are useful; use the blower mode to concentrate the leaves and the vacuum mode to suck them up and shred them.

The Black & Decker Leaf Hog features a new bag system that is easier to empty than the other models. We would recommend these tools only if you plan to use them for shredding fairly modest amounts of leaves. (If you just need to sweep your driveway and sidewalks, a broom and a little muscle power is the more sustainable and quieter way to go. And, with all of these power tools, we recommend wearing ear protection.)

In our tests, we found one tool made specifically to shred leaves. Called the Flowtron Leaf Eater (LE 900), it is essentially a large hopper with a string trimmer in the bottom. You toss leaves into the hopper and spinning strings quickly shred them into a very nice mulch. This electric-powered machine shreds leaves considerably faster than the blower/vacuums, and we found it chopped straw into mulch nicely, too.

This Flowtron is improved over the model we used several years ago. It’s now easy to replace the strings when they wear down, plus an elastic cord around the bottom of the hopper holds trash bags in place to catch the shredded leaves.

The Flowtron LE 900 sells for about $180 from www.leafmulcher.com or www.charliesgreenhouse.com .

If you’ve already learned to love your leaves, share your praises with us at letters@MotherEarthNews.com .

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