Yes - those are the kind of bath pouf/sponge I'm talking about - sorry. You can buy them in the bath section of any toiletries section in any store, although I recommend Walgreens or the dollar store for cheapness.

Martha, I'm not sure I understand - usually packaged in plastic bags, were your bags open where the water saturated the contents? If so, I'm not sure I know of a good way to make it sterile other than heating...the PH of household bleach is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 11 and that wouldn't seem good for a sowing medium. The amount recommended for flood cleanup is 1 C bleach to 1 Gal water so surely quite alkaline, even if the water wasn't oily looking it can carry all kinds of bacteria (flood water cleanup is making all the papers in this part of the country too, we've had water in places it's never been seen! :)) Are they large bags (expensive)? If the contents were wet, I might be tempted to use them for amending outdoor potting mixes and just start fresh at the store to save time and work.

for yard cleanup, I just use an old canvas tarp as a ground cloth - easy to drag around holds a ton of stuff, and I could pile 'compost to be' on one side, and branches and stuff on the other. branches I don't bag, I bundle - cut them 3 or so feet long, then stack them on top of baling twine a few feet high, tie off one end, tie off the other end (kneeling on the pile compacts it a lot) and tie the loose ends together to make a 'handle' - makes it easy for the trash guys (or the landscaping scavangers, who shred the stuff for mulch) to pick up and toss around.

Thanks for the feedback. rustyj14, just to clarify, I wasn't really asking about disposable bags, like the plastic "contractors' bags" you mentioned. I find them very useful, too, and I do use a lot of plastic or brown paper disposable bags like that for curbside pick-up of some kinds of yard waste. In addition to those, though, I'm thinking about some sort of a durable, permanent, non-disposable bag that I could use instead of plastic garbage cans for hauling bulky material from one part of the yard to another, where I would then dump it out and re-use the bag. For example, I've included a link below to a page featuring the kind of thing I'm inquiring about. If you or anyone has feedback or recommendations about what styles or brands of this kind of bag I should look for or avoid, that would be great. boltonranger, I would love a good chipper/shredder, and indeed that might be part of the solution (although I suppose I'd still end up having to haul material to the chipper shredder, and/or hauling shredded chips away from it). I think of a chipper/shredder as the kind of machine where the high-quality models would be prohibitively expensive, while the affordable models would be poor quality and not worth bothering with. But maybe that's not true. I imagine that in the current economic conditions, there are bound to be some deals to be had. I'll start poking around on craigslist. It's another product category that I'm not especially familiar with. If you have any suggestions or advice about good or bad chipper/shredder models, or features that I should look for, I'd appreciate it. Thanks again for your help with all this. Here is a link that might be useful: a Bosmere yard bag for sale on alwaysbrilliant.com