I really wouldn't spend money on purchasing this type of equipment. You can rent them by the day from several places such as Home Depot or local businesses. You could rent a chipper for a day for several years before it would equal the price of buying one. Plus by renting one, someone else is doing all of the maintenance on the equipment.

For what you want to do, you probably already own the chopper. A decent lawnmower is perfectly capable of plowing through (dry) leaves.

For what it's worth - we use two lawn mowers on our 1/2 acre - a 13 hp Honda riding mower with a 30" mowing deck and a Honda walk behind guided by yours truly. We've been chopping our leaves for the past 25+ years. The key is to do it a couple of times a week when the leaf drop rate is heavy and when they are as dry as possible. We mulch the leaves of 18 old maples, 3 oak, and the leaves of 19 new deciduous trees into confetti size pieces which I then use to cover the bases of roses and all tenders - like new hydrangeas and young rhododendrons. In the spring, I use a blower on a slower speed and blow off what wants to be blown off and the rest stays in place to decompose. The lines of chopped leaves that develops at the back of the property after crunching and blowing with the mowers, is then blown into my compost pile which, after roughly 3 years and adding veggie scraps to, is a nice pile of free soil. It's one way to help amend the rather clay, rocky soil we own. A neighbor who own a shredder,roughly the same amount of trees and property, takes far longer to mulch his leaves than we do because for him, there is much hand work involved and the frequent dragging of the tarp filled with chopped leaves to the back yard. The less one has to handle anything, the less time required. Plus, as mentioned above, I don't want to maintain one more thing that requires gas, plugs, or gets ornery and takes up garage space. Mow and blow works for us!

Kindly,
Jane

Thanks folks~ !

Well, I've got a Flowtron, and have been fairly happy with it. It's nowhere big enough to handle the 40 to 50 oaks I have, and the biggest drawback IMO is that it does not handle sticks well, but it does shred the leaves very nicely.

I've tried the lawn mower and it just doesn't seem to work for me. Perhaps the blades aren't sharp enough, or maybe the leaves are too deep - or maybe I've been spoiled by how finely shredded the leaves from the Flowtron are, but the lawnmower just doesn't do it for me.

The Flowtron is really just a big weed whacker, so maybe a regular old weed whacker in a garbage can will work. I never tried. I got the Flowtron as a gift and so I never tried any of the other methods, except for the lawnmower one fall when I was trying to do double duty (lawn mower and Flowtron at the same time!) Hey, I got a lotta leaves!

:)
Dee

Ontheteam, we just planted a large area last fall and were debating back and forth what to do about mulch.

We ultimately got a Troy Bilt chipper shredder that can handle 2" branches. Since we have a gazillion oak leaves we decided to go this route to shred leaves for mulch. We picked it up this spring and shredded the leftover leaves from fall. It worked exceptionally well. You can rake huge piles of leaves and then the chipper makes very short work of it. There's a large bag attached and when full is easy to carry and dump where you need it, so you don't necessarily have to move the chipper around. It worked well for twigs too.

My folks have the Troy Bilt that can take 3" branches. They have been using it for years for mulch and really like it. They put almost all their garden waste through it. It has been reliable and does a good job which is why we opted for a Troy Bilt, just a smaller version since our main goal is to make leaf mulch. Like Dee, I don't find the mower gets the leaves shredded as finely as I want them to be. The chipper solves that problem.

We have a small chipper/shredder. Can't remember the name off the top of my head - it's yellow! But it handles branches up to 1.5" diameter and also shreds leaves. I love it for chipping my brush - I then use the resulting wood chips as garden mulch - instead of buying bark mulch from the nursery.

But I have found the leaf shredder to be incredibly slow and inefficient. First you have to rake up all the leaves, then you have to hand feed them into the shredder, then you have to rake or shovel up the shredded leaves.

We use the lawn mower for the leaves. We have a ride on for our wooded acre lot. In the fall, my husband puts on the mulching blade and mows the lawn at the 6" height, letting the mulched leaves stay on the ground. Then he puts the bagger on, and switches to the regular mowing blade, and drops the mowing height to 4". We then empty the bags into the garden as mulch or into the compost pile.

We have the same setup, basically, as pixie_lou: the riding lawnmower with the bagging attachment will chop and pick up the majority of the leaves on the lawn in fall, and the small chipper/shredder if a finely chopped leaves/grass mix is desired. The "half-made" compost does a decent job smothering weeds over the winter, however. One of the enormous chippers (such as featured in the movie "Fargo" ) rents for $169 a day in our area, and you can get a half-day rate. Every other year or so we bring in one of the big boys for all the fallen branches and miscellaneous brush. And about the combination blower/leaf shredders: they DON'T do a good job picking up the leaves. I wasted my money on that one. Hope this helps.
Betsy

In the end if you think buying a chipper is a good commitment... Browse craigslist a little bit, I've seen 4" shredders for less than $200

The ONLY problem w/ using the mulch mow sweep method is.....the acorns.... lots and lots and lots of acorns...will get swept up w/ the leaves....

.

...and....???

Quite honestly I have a lot more trouble with the maple seeds than the acorns. Those stupid things end up everywhere.

We bought a heavy duty MacKissic shredder/chipper (ours is a model #LSC1100). We had a similar but smaller Troy and it kept jamming. The store we got it from was a specialty store that deals in machines like this (including heavy duty mowers and tillers and snowblowers) and although we had used the Troy for a week, they took it back and gave us full credit toward the larger and more powerful MacKissic.

I would shop around and go to a specialty store and speak to someone knowledgeable about the options available and your needs. Even if you ultimately buy something smaller elsewhere, their knowledge is very, very helpful.

We spent a few hundred $$ at Home Depot on a small unit that was woefully inadequate for our needs. We took a chance on the larger Troy, hoping to save a few hundred dollars. Big mistake. We should have gotten the MacKissic right from the start. No loss on our part, but what we spent on the smaller unit, which we sold for a pittance, was wasted in an effort to save money.

We have several truckloads of leaves (mostly oak with a small amount of nut, maple, and birch) and small branches delivered in the fall. We shred them using the largest grate and let it compost over the winter between two tarps. In spring we run it through the shredder again and it makes the most awesome black mulch. Add a little sterile manure and it's gold in the garden.

We got the idea to do this from one of the supervisors at the TTOR in MA and it was some of the best gardening advice we've ever gotten. We top it off spring and fall and it converts to humus. Sometimes in the fall, we add fresh leaves that have been shredded and not overwintered (if we are short of mulch) and by spring it has composted down and is wonderful.

I have a Flowtron and assorted vac-chippers for leaves, a small electric Leska chipper for no-big-deal chipping of low-gauge brush, and a Mighty Mac for big loads of brush; that one also handles leaves pretty well. Still, I mainly do leaves with the mower, as it seems to be the quickest way. The vac shredders are almost useless, IMHO, since they jam on wet leaves, sticks, or tough leaves, like rhody.

Oops, now that we have an electric mower, the other options may look better. I'm not sure if our B&D mower has the oomph for heavy piles of leaves - guess I'll know soon.