Fall Cleanup- Mulching Vs Bagging. Which is better for your yard?

alright guys today we got a jam-packed row we are going to be tackling a monster pile of leaves we're gonna take you out to one of our sites and show you guys how we do our fall cleanups we're gonna hopefully start to spur some conversation mulching versus bagging which is better and why now I know a lot of you guys kind of have your personal preference and I want to hear from you so today what are we waiting for let's just get into the video let's do it and we're gonna do a few wheelie all right let's do it now for our fall cleanups we use a hurricane c3 which is basically a giant ride on leap flow and one of the things we noticed when we're using this is it strips everything out of the grass I mean not just the leaves but a lot of the thatch everything basically gets removed because it's blowing so hard then nothing really can be left behind now it leaves the yard looking very crisp and very clean one of the ways that we use this leaf Laura's a lot of times will just Park it and use it like a wind tunnel will then use our handhelds to go into all of the nooks and crannies and tough to reach areas clean those out and push the leaves over to the lead floor they'll leave the big main ride-on leaf wall Cass gave the leaves out and away from the areas that we want cleaned up making our jobs just go a heck of a lot faster a heck of a lot easier this is how we handle our tomorrow's life [Music] so blowing leaves is a little bit like trying to herd cats one of the things I'd like about this lead floor is you can blow straight forward with it or you can blow it to the left or you can blow it to the right when you're trying to get leaves to go in a certain position and not every which way but loose it kind of helps to have that that control on a machine now if you are going to be bagging and tagging there's a number of different ways that you can actually use the handle and get rid of the leaves probably one of the easiest is a leaf vacuum like this but otherwise there's guys plenty of guys that still use tarps including us because we don't have the money for a leaf vacuum like this either way you do it you've got to get rid of them if you go on the route of bagging then when they want to get them out it's a dump trailer they just lift it up and dump them out are you a mulching or a bagging kind of guy your bagger you say that fast and pretty confidently why why's that [Music] needs that extra suction from the actual bagger attachment to pick up the leaves and suck the long grass up to make sure it all gets cut evenly and nice so you were saying that sometimes when you mulch it really what you're doing is you flattening down the grass and compacting the leaves into the soil even more which can potentially impede growth down the line right yeah for the following spring yeah yeah so that's something that I wanted to bring up because yes you can you can mulch a lot of leaves you can we're gonna actually show you just how much leaves you can actually mulch back in but that may lead to an extra dethatching cut and down the road yeah I always detach in the spring just because it does get all the extra fed grass up that was laid down from the year before well that's one way of looking at it another way is to let's just see how much what leaves we can mulch and make disappear [Music] so if you don't have the capability of bagging and calling your leaves offsite mulching them into the ground it's actually a viable object but you've got emulsion as fine as possible and that means going over it over and over and over again I mean if it doesn't work the first time why wouldn't it work the second time so to get these big leaves to break down into something that can actually reincorporate back into the soil means that I'm gonna have to go over it over and over and over again in fact to the point where you pretty much lose track of how many times you go over it but it's a better option than just leaving them whole and hoping that they break down on their own by taking time to do this step of the process you're creating fertile grounds that can be used down the road pile of leaves is gone but the leaves haven't gone anywhere they're now just broken down and it's kind of like think of it like this like chewing your food you don't just swallow at all while some of you do because you're pigs but when you chew your food it's the first step in the digestion process and so the finer that I can grind these up the more likely they are to incorporate back into the soil and actually become beneficial to the ground instead of the detrimental but at this point we're not there yet and I want to show you exactly why so I don't know if I'm in focus or not it is what it is but you can see where this stuff although now it's been pulverized and beaten up it's still too thick we can't lay it let it be this thick because the grass which is underneath here aways will choke out and die if we just leave it caked up this high so we've got to try to now spread this stuff out over a bigger area the easiest way to turn it into something that's beneficial for your lawn is to just knock it not make it quite so concentrated and that means taking the same pile of leaves and just spreading them out over a larger surface area and mulching them into the soil as fine as possible one of the things though that I think a lot of people do is they strip almost too much organic material out of the soil some of the leaves being incorporated back in is actually beneficial because then it will decay and add to the organic matter and so there really is if you guys are doing it one way or another way and you're wondering if you're doing it wrong I'm gonna skull on the record saying that there's more than one way to skin a cat and there's really not 100% one right way and 100% a wrong way there's just different levels and I guess you got to kind of look at what your lawn is like and determine what you want to do I mean if it doesn't look like it needs to be bagged it doesn't need to be begged you know but a lot of times if you can see where the grass kind of been laid over on the tracks along the edges where you write over it a lot and on spots where there's a little you know like a little indent in the ground where it's lower than it is around the rest of their you know the beggar just helps pull that grass up cut it short and then bring it along so some guys beg you you use this that fancy leaf blower that fancy ride on leaf blower did you notice that that helps a lot of grass up yeah that actually did a lot better than I thought it was going to hold a lot of the grass up so when we do come by with a more and we'll just cut it all nice and short then you know it's already all standing up blowing ready to go and we even took the hand lures too and blew out all the extra stuff too that the bagger would have done in the first place [Music] let's take a closer look at what the ground looks like in the area that we decided to do all of that mulching that was about one to two acres were the leaves that we stuck in one little 20 by maybe 40 foot area so let's see what it looks like well there it is you guys that entire mound of leaves now about as many leaves as we typically get off from a one acre site put right here in this this got to be 20 by 30 area ground up mulch down and disappeared is it perfect no but if you guys can't haul them mulching is actually a not a bad up or option you just got to get it pretty fine so you can see we're mulching is gonna add quite a bit of thatch back into the soil so that's just too thick I'm sure you guys can see that and if I leave it that way it's gonna choke out my grass next year so what I've got to do to fix this situation is simply re mulch it spread it out over a larger area and let it incorporate naturally right back into the soil [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so can you mulch up a giant pile of leaves to make it disappear yes you can is it necessarily a good thing well it depends on if you want the extra thatch or not in your lawn and if you need the extra organic material of course it's nature's fertilizer but some people are a little bit more picky and they don't want their yard looking like this and it is what it is you guys tell me in the comments down below which way do you guys go are you a mulcher or are you a bagger and why that's all we got for you today guys god bless go get them and I hope your fall cleanups go amazing we'll catch you on the flip-flop you guys I've never said that one before