It's the first week of September and nothing has dropped yet. That's the point of writing this now. Leaf season in the Triad doesn't really get going until late October, and it isn't finished until the oaks give up somewhere around the middle of December. The people who have an easy fall are the ones who sort it out in September.
The city's leaf trucks aren't coming
This will be the third fall under Greensboro's yard waste rules, and people are still getting caught out by them. The loose-leaf program ended in 2024. The city no longer sends vacuum trucks down the street to take whatever you raked to the curb. Yard waste goes in a cart or in paper bags, on your normal collection day:
- A 95-gallon yard waste cart, collected weekly
- Up to 15 paper bags or tied bundles alongside it during leaf season, and up to 10 the rest of the year
- Paper only. Plastic bags haven't been accepted since March 2024.
- Everything at the curb by 7am on your collection day
Leaves that fall naturally in front of your house are not your problem. Blowing your yard into the road and waiting for someone to come get it is, and the city can fine you for it. When WFMY reported on the rules, the process was a warning from a code enforcer, 14 days to clear the pile, and a $500 penalty on the books if it was still there 14 days after that. Nobody had been fined at that point. Check the city's yard waste page for where it stands now, rather than going off what a neighbor told you.
If you're outside the city limits, your rules are whatever your town says. The leaves are the same either way, and so is the truck.
It didn't go over quietly
A petition to bring loose-leaf collection back pulled in thousands of signatures, and the man behind it put the problem plainly: it worked for two or three weeks, and after that he was overwhelmed. That is the honest version for a lot of properties around here. A yard with three mature oaks does not fit in fifteen bags.
The city's side of it is that only about a quarter of homeowners ever used the old program, that the streets are clearer now, and that storm drain backups dropped off sharply once people stopped raking into the road. Both things can be true at once. Either way, the leaves still come down in November and somebody has to move them.
Why we got into leaf collection
This started as a pressure washing company. A few winters ago I hit a patch of wet leaves on my bike and nearly went down, and that stuck with me. Leaves sitting in the road are a genuine safety problem, not just an eyesore, and the new rules meant a lot more of them were going to end up there.
So when the city auctioned off its old leaf machines, we bought two of them. FOX8 came out that November and covered how people were adapting, and WFMY followed the argument through December. The short version is that the same equipment which used to run these streets still runs them. It just shows up on a day you were given in advance.
You get a date. That is the day we are there.
What that means for your yard
You don't bag anything. A vacuum truck takes volume that bags can't, so there's no fifteen-item ceiling, no pile sitting at the curb for a month waiting on a collection day, and nothing raked into the street for somebody else to skid on. We clear the lawn, the beds and the hard surfaces, and all of it leaves on the truck.
When to book
Most properties want two visits. One mid-season once the maples and poplars are down, and a final one after the oaks finish, which is usually early to mid December. Under mature oaks or pines you're looking at three or four. Pine needles are the worst of it, because they shed year-round instead of all at once.
It's worth doing the gutters on the same trip. The crew is already on site, the debris goes in the same load, and a gutter still packed in January is how fascia boards rot. We wrote up the timing on that separately.
Get on the calendar
The schedule fills from late October, and the December dates go first because everybody wants the last cleanup before the holidays. Booking in September costs you nothing and gets you the slot you want. Estimates are free and on site. Start with leaf removal, add gutter cleaning if the roofline needs it, and if the cleanup turns up a pile of brush and old furniture, junk removal takes that too.