November 21, 2002
When leaves come down, gardeners rev up
While the average employee is admiring the color of the leaves on campus, at least 30 people are thinking more about how to get rid of them. It’s the campus gardeners’ task to clean up the mess when the leaves fall, and quite a mess it is.
According to grounds supervisor Bonnie Taylor, October and November are months when her whole crew spends at least some of their time working on the leaves.
“Our first goal in the morning is to clear the leaves off stairs and walkways, for safety reasons,” Taylor says.
To do that, the gardeners use leaf blowers. Although the blowers are one piece of equipment that’s not well loved, they’re necessary because they make it possible for one gardener to cover a lot more ground than he or she could ever hope to do with a rake. Taylor says the University has purchased the quietest leaf blowers on the market and the crew tries to get the leaf blowing done early in the morning, before classes start.
On the campus lawns, the gardeners use a leaf sweeper, a tractor-like device that gathers the leaves by means of both a brush and vacuum. From there, the leaves are loaded onto a truck and taken to one of several waste containers on campus.
“We do put some of the leaves in our plant beds to nourish the soil and keep the weeds down,” Taylor says, “but we have too many leaves to use them all.”
The rest are picked up and taken to Cedar Grove where they are turned into compost.
How many leaves are there? Staff at Property and Transport Services, who do the hauling, don’t keep track. The obvious answer: a lot.
