Quality and safety of municipal leaf mulch

I have used the semi-composted mulch from the municipal pile in building my lasagna beds. I also use it as mulch on new flower beds, but now I am beginning to wonder what might be in them that I don't want to put on a vegetable bed. Does anyone have an idea? This stuff is piled up on the side of the road by homeowners, I guess, collected by the city trucks and carted to a mountainous pile, where it will start rotting somewhat over the winter.

But I wonder whether this process, mainly the truck part, could add noxious compounds, that could be absorbed by veggies in my garden? They also scrape up some dirt from the original site, as well as the occasional squashed coke bottle or tooth paste tube.

I have relatively easy access to the pile, just have to shovel it in our little truck and then dump it out again.

What do you think?

Many thanks, C.

That's a scary question, and I don't think that you will ever get a complete answer. I think that the municipalities do their best, but you don't know that the homeowner has done on their property. I have no idea how long any residual chemicals would last that someone has applied to their property, and I doubt that the city could give you a satisfactory answer other than to say that it should be safe.

Unfortunately, I don't have any concrete answers either.

Unfortunately due to the unknown factors I do not put anything in my pile that I don't know where it came from. Unfortunately there is the possibility someone could dump an entire bottle of roundup or bug killer or oil or anything in their grass clippings, boxes, etc. and then dump them in the community pile. I've seen no regulations regarding them and while the piles are available with the best intentions there is always going to be someone who is not as careful or just doesn't care what goes into it.

Clementine - hubby and I have this rule-of-thumb - we go around the neighborhood and collect leaves/grass clippings that have been bagged for pick-up BUT ONLY if the yard looks unkempt! We figure they are not as likely to have used bug or grass killers.

Well, I was afraid I might this kind of answers. Where I live nobody bags up their leaves, they just all fly away with the autumn winds. Theoretically, I should have a good amount of leaves myself, but I hardly ever do, because it seems we live in a wind corridor that always blows them away before they can be raked (I guess to some extent that is an envious position to be in). Here, they are also always mixed in with tons of sweet gum balls and pine needles.

I'll just muddle on as I have, but my lasagna beds do need some more layering after this fall, I think.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

C.

For my part, I do use municipal leaf mulch in the garden, even on food crops. I guess my thinking is that if there are harmful chemicals in them, a) the plants would look sickly, and I wouldn't eat them anyway, b) in the vast majority of cases, the harmful chemicals would be at such a low concentration, especially after months of being snowed and rained on in massive piles, that it won't matter. Maybe I'm just particularly risk-acceptant. :-)

Jsorens, I am not sure that your arguments are strong. If plants were to look sickly, as you say, that could mean - I guess - that perhaps there was some herbicide in the material in the pile. But I don't know if any other chemicals would make plants look bad, or how you would even know, since there are many other things that can make plants not thrive or look weird.

Snow and rain , even if they could penetrate those huge piles, would only concentrate bad stuff at the bottom.

How long have you been using this material on your vegetable garden?

I wish some other organic gardeners would chime in with their opinions.

In the meantime, I am using this leaf mulch on my non-food garden beds, of which I have a lot, and it would cost me a fortune to get shredded wood mulch.

Clementine, Here in Missouri we can send a sample off to the University to have it analyzed. For a fee of course.