Green Living by Janet Marchant: Greening Your Fall Cleanup

At this time of year, falling leaves remind me of the sun-dappled Octobers of my childhood, before I was environmentally conscious. My family would rake up dead leaves, scoop them into plastic bags, and send them straight to the landfill. It never occurred to us that there might be a better way to handle that yearly problem, but lately I've discovered how rewarding it can be to handle my fall leaves the Green Living way.

Want to know my secret? It's so simple: just cut down all of your trees. Luckily, I had already started burning chunks of my trees indoors to help reduce my home heating costs last year, and boy has it paid off! I can already tell the difference in the number of bags of leaves I'm having to put in the trash. I can't wait to get out my chainsaw and start doing some more good for my pocketbook and for our overburdened landfills. This is what they call a "win-win" solution. And as an added bonus, I get much better views from my windows without all those trees in the way.

So why not get started today, before all of the leaves have fallen? Of course, those green leaves stuck to the branches don't burn very well, so I might have to come up with some other way to dispose of them, but that'll be no problem next year.