The Urbana campus is home to more than 18,000 trees.

For years, F&S has helped maintain a publicly-available online database of all trees on campus through “TreeKeeper,” seen here: https://go.fs.illinois.edu/trees. Now, imagine all those leaves…

An afternoon with a rake, a few bags, and a rewarding warm apple cider won’t be enough to clear all those leaves. No, F&S Grounds workers use different, stronger tactics.

When leaves first come, 14 mowers are fitted with a new blade system that cuts up the leaves into even finer bits than you’d traditionally get, so that there’s no big pieces of leaf debris left in the grass. The much finer material settles back into the lawn, becoming a beneficial amendment to the soil and grass. Too much of that, though, can damage the ground, so when larger leaf deposits come later in the year, leaves get removed in another way.

Four large vacuums that sit on the back of tractors are deployed, as well as personal, backpack-style vacuums hit the grounds, too. The tractor-led machinery gets the job done for the largest piles. Leaves are sucked up and shipped off site from the main campus over to a field near the Pollinatarium where giant leaf piles are left in rows in the the open and treated as compost.

“We regularly rotate the materials, just like a little composter for your yard” said Grounds foreperson Isaac Williams. “It will break down over time. When we use it again, it’ll be mostly lawn restoration, versus plant beds. It’s good organic matter that we recycle just like our trees. It’s all re-used.” Williams noted the difficult weather related to leaves is wind, noting that even wet leaves are easy to manage, as they won’t fly around as easily. Tracking the hours is key, too, to not use loud blowers early in the morning near Housing facilities.

“We just try to be as quick as possible. We’ve been asked to shut down by professors if we’re close to a classroom, for instance. All operators are wearing hearing protection for 8 hours, so it can be loud.”