If the turf is solid enough I'll always use the dump from seat bagger for leaf cleanups where they are going to rear woods or front curb for pickup by me or town.

I find significant shredding when using the bagger. Usually with fall things may be getting sloppy so I try to minimize the passes on the property. Doesn't make sense to me to do a mulch pass than a second pickup pass.

 

If you're already blowing most of the leaves off before running the mowers, I see no point in mulching before bagging.

 

A whole leaf has greater surface area so it catches the wind like a sail. Mulched up pieces are tiny and air movement doesn’t affect them nearly at all. Your friend is right. If you’re going to bag, do it first. Mulching then trying to bag is a huge waste of time.

 

is this true even when there is a huge amount of leaves? obviously if you dont have a sea of leaves covering the yard there is no point in mulchin.

for reference, here is the amount of leave we ended up mulching and bagging

I also took the picture before we blew out the beds, which ended up holding a very large amount of leaves that doubled whats on the lawn.

I also took some footage while i was mulching the leaves, so you can kind of see what the leaves where being reduced to before bagging

Scag Vride 2 Mulching Leaves

Some POV actionmower has just over 300 hours now

youtube.com

with that amount of leaves, do you think it would still be better to just gun it with baggers and skip mulching?
it does make sense what you and my friend said about the larger leaves being easier to suck up due to more surface area but does this still hold true with that many leaves?

 

Yeah I just blow the beds out and toss the perennial cuttings on to the lawn first with the backpacks.

 

Mulching leafs reduces the volume from a truck load to a can full.
If you are using 2 mowers.
Why blow to curb first.
Setup like that. I would have one mower mulching. Other follows behind sucking up the clippings.
With little to no blowing at all

 

Mulching leafs reduces the volume from a truck load to a can full.
If you are using 2 mowers.
Why blow to curb first.
Setup like that. I would have one mower mulching. Other follows behind sucking up the clippings.
With little to no blowing at all

I would skip mulching if you have a powered bagger and gator blades. They practically turn the leaves to dust. You can't get any more crunched up than that.

We ran a setup similar to what you said , a vride 2 with a chute blocker and a exmark lazer z with a powered bagger

we would blow out the beds, id go crazy mulching with the vride then he would come with the exmark to suck up everything-the virde had a bagger and i used it but it would fill up quickly with the leaf mulch- cant imagine how fast it would fill up with regular leaves.

my dream leaf cleanup machine would be the 37 hp 52 vride 2 with x blades and powered bagger. the problem with just running gators is while they definitly mulch the leaves to nothing, and pack baggers, they dont always have enough suction to pick up all the leaves, especially with how they are designed to recycle leaves- thats how they chop them up so fine. so a gator blade paired with a standard probably gives the best of both worlds.

 

Blow to the curb, mulch, then vacuum and I have basically 2 44 gallon cans of debris in the back of the truck if I have to remove them. If you have trouble vacuuming after mulching, drop the deck down as low as it will go. The dust that can't be vacuumed gets returned to the lawn. No one but me knows.

 

My hustler with gators and a powered bagger did a great job getting most of the leaves. The problem I had was all the dust in the air. I ended up going back to high lifts to try and mitigate that. I usually blow the leaves into the woods before bagging and use the mower to make it look pretty

 

Don't high lifts make it worse? It did on my Toro.

 

It depends, if you are having haul the leaves off, I would mulch first as it greatly reduces the amount debris to be hauled. If you dumping leaves on the property, I would just bag.
Actually, I haven't bagged in 10 years, but that's another debate.

 

When you have leaves that thick in that video, DEFINITELY mulch then bag, otherwise you're bagger is full after 10'.

 

This year two towns we service have eliminated curb side pick up and we dont have woods to blow to. Our principal operation now has gone to blow beds and all paved areas to the grass. Run over everything once with the stander and let it fly, then suck up everything with the Walker, then run it through the truck loader. We have done the route one full time this month and the dump trailer is not even half full. Damn near turns back to dirt. Lawns look amazing and we have actually reduced time on the route by a tiny bit.

 

I keep telling guys....., mulch those puppies!!!

 

With what you showed in your pics/vids, mulch for ONE pass and then bag what's left. The pieces left behind will, for the most part, be still large enough to suck up fairly eaily and the debris will be reduced to less than half due to the first pass mulching.

 

In my area of suburban subdivisions without bulk leaf pickup and no woods.

Sometimes leaves are too deep to make a pass of any sort without plowing leaves around at my usual 2.5”-3” cut height. I’ve been known to raise the deck with closed chute and fly around to reduce, mulching or bagging goes way better like that without leaves piling up on the deck and spilling off onto clean areas. A quick pass with the deck higher reduces the bulk without “dustin em up”, I like that saying for some reason, but they’re not confetti, just the fluff taken away.

Brown bags on the curb or haul off are the basic options for leaf removal here. While taking the time to really mulch leaves, only to go back and bag seems, or really is a time killer, the additional difficulty and time to suck up small particles resistant to vacuum is trying.

It’s worth a try to meet in the middle an do a quick reduction pass with high deck then a following bagging pass where the leaves still have enough body to be vacuumed but won’t be plowed around, and will be further reduced and tightly packed in the accelerator. I’ve wasted plenty of time dusting up leaves only to need multiple passes to get the heavy small particles fully up.

This is my third leaf season in my business so my opinion isn’t coming from a decade or two of boots on the ground. I hope the theory in itself makes sense.

 

I like what is being said about just one mulch pass to reduce a bit to allow you to pack baggers more, but not so much it becomes a beach to suck them all up efficiently, makes alot of sense to meet in the middle like that!

 

If the powered bagger chops them up, I'd like to see a test where a mower with gators goes until the bags are full, and then have a different mower mulch the leaves followed by a mower bagging them and see how much longer this mower can go before the bags are full. After seeing my bags packed with shredded leaf dust from using a powered bagger and gators I am having a hard time thinking mulching first would be that much more effiecient.

 

Too much chopping and it gets too heavy to lift easily!! I don't know how I know, but it's true!

 

I know a guy that chopped and collected so fine that his Trac-Vac did a wheelie all the way to the dumpster!!

 

Roll over it a few times w/fully baffled mulch kit and gators then disperse the dust w/bp’s. You can do some large volume dusting quickly if you got high hp mowers, dry leaves and baffled mulch kits. Roll over in reverse with rear deck high front low works best

just spread around the dust w/ big bp

wet we leave for municipal curbside vacs or haul away and dump

 

Been doing that method for the last 2 -3 seasons!

 

I realize this thread is more about bagging, but:
I mulch 100% of Fall & Spring leaves...and dry leaves require the least time w/ the best results. Respirator mask required...the most potent way to damn the dust.

 

I just watched a guy drag a big AZZ tarp full of wet leaves to the curb. Just shake my head at the obstinence of tarpers!

 

I grind them up first it there's a lot of them. I also grind up windrows before blowing them into the woods sometimes. It reduces the volume, make it less likely that they'll blow out onto the lawn and helps hold the loose leaves down as well.

I have a cleanup only account where the owner uses the ground up leaves as mulch in her perennial beds. I grind them up then bag them with my Z and vacuum bagger and put them in contractor bags for her. This is specifically what she wants. She used to do it herself with her JD tractor.

I like any leaves that I bring home to be ground up too. They go into a compost pile and compost much faster than when they're whole. Any whole leaves go into a different pile.

 

Municipal comes by most streets at least once with their ODB/Extreme Vac 99hp vac units or front end loaders if heavy layer of snow. Tarp and haul curbside is way faster than mulching when you can.

 

If I was not on my phone I would post a Ron Burgundy and say "I don't believe you"! 😂😂😂 If you're mulching with a 21" mower, maybe. If it's under a 1000sq ft. maybe. I'm not a "tarper" any more. Too much work and mulch is environmentally sound and will save the planet and stop climate change dead in it's tracks.

 

You can get a mountain of leaves on a 12x10 tarp quick. One guy can slide it to curb and dump in seconds. Not even close race.

wet you even better off tarp and haul.

no way I’m mulching if municipal mechanical pick up is avail.

 

You hate the planet!!! 😂😂😏😂

 

I might have posted this before. My neighborhood is heavily wooded. Everyone collects their leaves and brings them to the curb for the Township to pick up. It's a lot of work. I'm lazy, so I just mulch mow the leaves and they stay on the lawn.
Our soil was at 3% soil organic matter. It's now at 8%. I no longer have any fungal diseases and have greatly reduced the amount of N required to provide a deep green lawn.

 

I’ve been heavily suggesting that I mulch leaves unless bagging is absolutely necessary. I hope you know what your talking about because I tell people all the benefits I’ve seen you state over my time on lawnsite. Just joking my friend, but I do take heed to your advice and apply it in my business.

🤜🏼🤛🏽

 

Thank you. 😊
I know that I travel to the beat of a different drummer on Lawnsite.
It's good to hear some positive feedback.
Thanks again.

 

me and a friend are having a polite debate over whether its easier to suck up leaves with a mower after mulching them up a bit or just straight to bagging.

i was helping him out with some cleanup jobs and our weapons of choice was a scag vride 2 and an older exmark lazer z.

I usually stuck with the vride because im a stander guy but also because it has the advance chute, which works wonders for mulching leaves.

he would take the bags off the back of the lazer z and use it to mulch leaves that way.

but what we ended up doing most of the time was blowing leaves from front lawns to the curb, then go crazy mulching leaves with the mowers in the back, then attach baggers and suck up the mulch.

it did take considerable time, with how many mulching passes we did, but the end result turned out good.

He was saying after the jobs how he thinks that the mulching is a waste of time, and it would be easier for the mowers to suck up whole leaves versus the mulch because the mulch is more dense(??). i was saying we are able to pack more into the baggers with the leaves cut smaller, while he thinks the opposite is true.

we were trying a new way to do cleanups and both of us usually do our cleanups by blowing the leaves off the lawn and then suck up the survivors with mowers, not go head first with the mowers, so neither of us really know for sure whats better yet lol.

Im curious about your thoughts? is it really easier for machines to pick up whole leaves versis mulch?

Thanks for the question. It's hard to say, but I will tell you the smart way to do it: mulch. When you mulch leaves, you break them up into tiny pieces, so much less effort is required to bag them up. If you don't mulch, then almost all of the leaves have to be blown into the bagger. It's a lot easier to mulch than it is to bag leaves. What kind of bagger do you have? If you have a big, chute-less, cylindrical bagger, then it's going to be a lot harder to bag mulched leaves because there's just so much less room in there. If you have a chute-less, rectangular bagger, then it's probably easier to bag mulched leaves, but you might have to do some unloading to get all the leaves into your bag, especially if they're all over the place. I hate doing that, which is why I mulch. Mulching leaves is most easily done with a rear-discharge mower.

 

Save the planet and bury the leaves . Trees collect atmospheric carbon and a lot ends up in the leaves. The best thing to do with them is get them up and bury them very deep. Next best is leave them deep in the forest to decompose extremely slowly. Mulching improves the soil but releases the carbon faster. Deep burial sequesters carbon. Natural composting of leaves releases the carbon through microbial action back into the atmosphere. The faster the decomposition, the faster the release.

Personally I mulch and then a second pass to bag the remnants. Chopped residue is scattered in various beds and woods — almost nothing leaves my property (hey, dump runs cost time and money lol).

 

i feel like im hearing 2 very different things now, lol

 

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