Fall leaves pile up behind your house, your neighbor in Maine got a deal on a leaf blower from Mardens.
Yes, the big stately maple and another oak tree are on your property.
The brightly colored leaves from both trees fall on the lawns of all the surrounding property owners. Some of the thick carpet of autumn tree leaves on your lawn drifted in from the many neighborhood house lots around you.
Is it legal in Maine to fire up the leaf blower and systematically “push” the fall tree leaves off your lawn to park them on your neighbor’s property?
Answer is yes.
Raking, blowing leaves onto someone else’s private property is illegal in Maine.
The dumping, blowing, raking yard waste onto a neighbor’s land is considered littering, illegal dumping.
Besides not getting an invitation to their New Year’s party celebration. Or being crossed off their Christmas card list.
What are the other fines and penalties for promiscuous dumping, littering?
You have to check with your municipality but state of Maine fines range from $100 to $2,000 depending on the severity. And what else besides fall foliage tree leaves were deposited on your property from a neighbor’s land.
Someone in the blog audience is whispering..
(Hand cupping ear to listen more intently) saying well isn’t the source of the fall leaves from the tree on your neighbor anyway? It’s his tree, his problem and his leaves to deal with this fall. In the eyes of the law, that does not matter.
Let Mother Nature and a strong wind blow the leaves where they may. But don’t retaliate by returning them along with your own lawn leaves.
If you start those bad habits as a newly relocated move to Maine homeowner, you won’t get invited next door for beans and hotdogs.
Also, in the panic to uncover your lawn and free it from a thick wet mess of decomposing tree leaves.
Don’t get the bright idea of pushing them into the public street.
Or the neighboring park, school, church lot or whatever else is bordering your Maine property. Unless you want to make the news. Get a notice of a big fat fine owed down at the town office or local Maine police station.
If the tree leaves naturally fall from a tree on your neighbor’s property spilling onto your lawn, you are legally responsible for your own yard.
Herding, blowing, raking them back onto the neighbor’s property is considered illegal dumping.
The tree source does not matter. And how do you really determine anyway how many of these leaves piling up are from your own yard and Joe’s property two doors down?
Leaves, twigs, acorns, storm debris on your lawn are yours to dispose of properly exclusively. And make sure they don’t get all dumped on the corner storm drain next door. Why besides trespassing and illegal dumping ticket fines?
Those piles of leave and yard debris can plug up the drain like too much hair accumulating in the one in your household shower.
The organic waste can make the public storm drain useless next spring and cause basement flooding.
Where hopefully the Winter Snow Bird home owner did plug in sump pumps with outside hose drains. To work around the clock while no one’s home emptying those soggy cellars.
Better to talk with the neighbor.
Don’t retaliate by “returning the favor” firing up your own Marden’s special leaf blower. Or borrowing his to march those leaves and more from your yard to his private property.
Or put the leaves in a compost bin. Bag them and create green matter to add to the garbage stream of debris. Look into a fire permit and a windless day. To burn those leaves but remembering what Smokey says. Only you can prevent forest fires.
I like to mulch the leaves into fine shreds to decay, go back into the ground as natural nutrients.
Or I could bag them to release on a wooded section of a family Maine farm I own a couple miles out of town.
Everyone loves and enjoys the brilliant fall foliage colors in Maine. But after the fireworks explosion of reds, oranges, yellows, browns, and a million shades of green, those leaves in the natural setting don’t bother anyone.
Wildlife use them for building homes and a natural ground cover.
Leaves in that forest setting don’t bother anyone.
As long as you get permission. Or you own the Maine land where the in-town leaves get relocated to keep your neighbor’s happy campers.
The catch and release, the practice of heading back into the wilds can go a long way toward improving neighbor relations.
And in Maine, what about the pair of pooches next door?
Who like clock work do their morning constitutional habit on your back, side or front lawns? “Giving it back” even though you don’t even own a dog of your own is considered illegal dumping too.
No one likes to get dumped on. Literally or figuratively.
It all makes the idea of moving, living in the country with the closest neighbor a half mile away seem very attractive doesn’t it?
Some of it revolves around common courtesy and do unto others as you would want done to you and just a better upbringing of have some consideration. Keep it simple. Maine is all about simple living.
Same courtesy when a small Maine community gets a few inches of new white snow.
Push it back on your property, not onto your neighbors.
You plow new snow best when a plan is worked out between you and you neighbors.
Be neighborly and strive to get along, to be fair to all parties. Before hard feelings fester from where all the snow gets parked after each Maine winter storm.
I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573 | info@mooersrealty.com |
MOOERS REALTY 69 North Street Houlton Maine 04730 USA
