A seasonal joke concerns one pessimist asking another: "You want to go up to New England to watch the leaves die?" The fall foliage is about over now, even this far south; and we're faced with enough raking to turn us into pessimists or even apartment dwellers.
The leaves are lying there, increasingly sodden and heavy with every rain, and if we don't get them up they'll be slippery on the pavement and they'll make the grass underneath get some awful fungus next spring.
In the past several years, regional governments have increased their efforts to collect and then recycle the leaves as nutrient-rich compost. Compost breaks down clay, adds water and nutritional capacity to sandy soils and adds essential ingredients to any soil.
In the northern part of the city, in what is called "high-leaf areas," trucks called load-packers are sucking 6,000 tons of leaves with enormous vacuum tubes, if home-owners rake them onto the side of their street. The leaves are taken to Camp Small, at the intersection of Interstate 83 and Cold Spring Lane, where, in many months they'll become bacteria, fungi and protozoa-rich compost and put back on urban public gardens in the spring.
Leaves that are left on the curb in bags are picked up and burned because the sanitation men can't take the time to peek into the bags. So, through December 10, in a new effort to help citizens who don't live in high-leaf areas and who don't want their leaves burned, people can take bags of leaves to Morgan State University at Parking Lot Q at Hillen Road and Perring Parkway or to Pimlico Race Course at the corner of Belvedere and Northern Parkway.
Another new service is that, if you call the city's bulk pick-up number, 396-4515 November 29 or 30 and ask, the city will come pick up your leaves. They will be composted, not burned.
Baltimore County's leaf-recycling program is also on the move. In the last year 140,000 households have been in a comprehensive (bottles, glass, cans, paper) recycling program. About half of that number also has its leaves and grass clippings picked up (in bags) and taken to one of three stations (Eastern Sanitary Landfill, near White Marsh, Resource Recovery, in Cockeysville and Hernwood, in the western part of the county).
In the spring the compost is spread on various Baltimore County landscape projects. By the middle of next year, the comprehensive program will include 220,000 homes, all the single-family homes in Baltimore County; the leaf pick-up program will be extended, too.
You can save the government time and money and make a compost heap from your leaves and clippings in a corner of your yard and put the stuff back on your garden or around your trees and shrubs after it has decomposed. Don't let it get dry, and turn it occasionally. The recycling center spokespeople of both regions urge citizens to mow grass high and let it lie, not to send it to be recycled. Grass adds needed nitrogen directly to the earth or to compost.
Putting aside the Norman Rockwell effect of the family raking leaves together, of young children jumping in the piles; putting aside the pungent aroma, the rustle and scrape of the raking, putting aside the inevitable windstorm that undoes about half of your efforts, remember that the most inept gardener can only profit from compost.
It's a variation on the ashes to ashes, dust to dust theme, a useful biology lesson. Think of it as paydirt.
Ann Egerton is a Baltimore writer.