[Baby Lee]

Gotta say, one of the few things St. Louis gets spot on, throughout the metro area at lesser used park grounds, they collect street sweeping and machine shredded foilage for mulch, topsoil from things like tree removal or new sidewalks, and huge sectioned hardwood from felled trees, and in the spring whatever you can haul off is yours free.

I get about a yard each of mulch and topsoil yearly for my various gardens, and the only limit is my hauling capacity and how much I feel like shoveling.

The one nearest me has a spot about the size of a smallish supermarket parking lot, with the mulch piled about 15 feet high. That part isn't public, but they have a front loader that puts out about 10-foot tall single piles of the mulch and topsoil separately in an area that is full access, and about enough random hardwood to fill 3-4 parking spaces.

Wish I had the facilities to deal with the hardwood, . . . this year they had sections of trunk that were big around enough to make tabletops from. I'm talking 3+ feet around on the flat face and anywhere from 3-5 feet thick. They also have smaller pieces, and all of it would make awesome turnings or hardwood objects worth $100s apiece if you had the machinery to work it.