How to manage enormous volume of fall leaves when they cannot be left alone or hauled away.
We have three very large trees on a 0.2 acre lot. Our city comes around early in the season (before most of the leaves have even dropped) to haul away leaves in those ~30 gallon brown paper bags.
Last year we filled twenty two of those bags, compressed down as much as we could without tearing the bags. (None of our neighbors filled more than ten such bags. Most had two or three.)
So the city hauled away 22 bags, and over the course of the next two months we accumulated an additional 26 bags of mulched leaves.
We did the mulching ourselves with a basic leaf mulcher that claims a 16:1 reduction ratio. Doubtful, but it's what we've got.
We've been doing this for six years running now, and as we've been putting a lot of money into caring for the trees (unlike the previous owners) their leaves are of course increasing year by year.
The main problem we have is that the only way we've had to dispose of them isn't sustainable any more. Our compost can holds 1.5 bags worth of mulched leaves, and the compost is only picked up every two weeks. At a rate of 3 bags/month it takes 8-9 months to get rid of all of them. And by early spring the contents have gotten wet many times over, they turn to mush, all kinds of creatures make a home in them, and the bags begin to break down not long after that so that lifting and emptying them (very heavy even when dry) into a 4 foot tall bin isn't an easy or pleasant task. We have no place to store them where they might be kept dry.
We cannot haul them anywhere ourselves because the compost place in our city won't accept this volume, and renting a truck large enough to haul them to the next closest location (that also might not accept the full volume) would cost as much as hiring someone to do the entire job for us.
Hiring someone to do the entire job sounds lovely albeit pretty expensive for us, and they would need to come out at least three separate times. The leaves that fall in October cannot be left on the ground until December when the last ones finally come down because neighbors will absolutely report us to the city. Even if we somehow manage to keep them contained to our property (impossible without bagging them) they would still complain, and we'd still get a fine.
We're at a loss for what to do. Upgrading our mulcher could make the process a little easier and might improve the volume issue but the bags would only get heavier. So most of the overall problem would still persist, except maybe it'd only take 6 months to dispose of it all.
I'm at a loss for what else to do. I'm dreading the coming weeks, and I used to love autumn. Two years ago my husband was down with a back injury during this time and I had to all of this work on my own. I dread something like that happening again.
I'd love any suggestions you might have, though I'm at a loss to imagine anything that wouldn't be even more expensive than hiring a company take care of the whole thing three separate times.