Shout it from the treetops! Riverside Park Conservancy has a new leaf vacuum!
With leaves beginning to fall, this tool will help us quickly collect leaves from stairs, pavement and ballfields, and mulch them into garden beds and natural areas. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this gift. For those of you wondering what’s so enticing about a leaf vacuum, remember that life on the limb is only the first part of a leaf’s story.
After a summer of soaking up sunshine and providing shade, deciduous tree leaves’ green pigment (chlorophyll) fades once cool fall weather arrives. At this stage, other pigments become visible, turning a leaf red, yellow or orange before it bids adieu to their tree and sways to the ground. The next part of a leaf’s story is often overlooked.
Fallen leaves are integral to any natural landscape. They regulate soil temperature and moisture levels, and fertilize soil while suppressing weeds. These leaves provide habitat to a diversity of beneficial insects, including fireflies and some native bees. Leaves and mulch also help to mitigate flooding.
This equipment connects to our small park vehicles (UTVs) and can lift a ballfield’s worth of leaves in a fraction of the time it would take staff with leaf blowers. An internal shredder allows leaves to be easily distributed over lawns to improve soil health. This process saves staff time, helps keep our stairs and courts safe, and increases our supply of nutrient-rich leaf mulch!
Many leaves in Riverside Park, however, fall on pavement, stairs and ballfields. Leaves don’t do their best work in these locations. To allow our gardeners to efficiently move leaves from pavement to soil, where fallen leaves are needed, we’re excited to introduce our new leaf vacuum, Leif Hoover!
The leaf mulch we create on site with Leif is used throughout the park. This not only improves soil and plant health, but it means funding that would otherwise be spent on mulch can go toward more exciting park initiatives and plantings. It also means fewer heavy-duty vehicles on our roads which improve air quality!
Not all leaves share the same journey. Some may fall gracefully under their tree and become a roof for a bumble bee, while others fall on basketball courts and are collected, shredded, and deposited across a meadow where they provide the nutrients needed for next spring’s flowers to bloom. What falls today becomes part of what grows tomorrow.
