I often find Lifehacker articles to be not particularly useful, but I can wholly endorse the article I’m linking to below.
15 years ago we moved to a place on 1-1/2 acres, with lots of deciduous trees, Fall leaf pickup was a monumental task, to say the least. I bought a used leaf collector gadget for my lawn tractor, but it was only the size of a large kitchen trash can and would fill up before I completed one row of the lawn. The chute part would also jam up a lot.
Then I MacGuyvered taller sides on a cart I pulled behind my lawn tractor and a wide-bore flexible metal length of ducting that went from the cutting deck to the cart. It worked great and held a huge amount of leaves, but there was still the tansfer to lawn bags. We could literally fill 3 dozen lawn bags or more in a Fall leaf season.
Finally, one Fall I said screw it, and just ran over the leaves several times until they were ground down to small pieces, using the cutting deck outlet to blow and distribute the pieces evenly. Even starting with what seemed like huge amounts of leaves, I could eventually get ti to where you couldn’t even notice leaf litter on the lawn, it was so ground down and evenly distributed. I never looked back.
I start every Fall using my mulching mower to attack the leaves once a week. Eventually they get too thick and we rake them up, but it does massively cut down on leaf collection.
We collect clippings when mowing, using them to mulch our various flower beds, etc. It is a bit of a chore, but sure beats purchasing trailer loads of commercial mulch.
Yeah, it definitely helps to attack the leaves early and often, though even when the leaves seem too thick on the ground, I find that a few passes really break them down well (but that might be due to having a lawn tractor with twin mulching blades on a 46" deck. A push mower may not be up to the task after a certain point).
I did that when I lived in Denver. I had a rear-bagging mower. I said “screw it” one year, and instead of raking the leaves, I ran over them with the mower. The rear bag caught the shredded leaves and I would empty the bag into one of those big plastic bags for collecting yard waste.
I do the reverse. I start by raking them, and as the season progresses and i get behind, i use my lawnmower. But i also bag them, using a setting pathway between “bag only” and “mulch”. I use the shredded leaves as mulch for me raspberries and shrubs. They work great.
I have too many leaves to just leave the shredded leaves on the grass, but they do make awesome (and cheap) mulch.
One other thing I tried between bagging leaves and just shredding / mulching them with the mower, was building a big leaf composter out of old wood palettes and chicken wire. It does break down into great mulch after a loooong time, but it’s a ton of work mixing in and rotating the pile with a pitchfork. Just the direct approach for me from now on.
See, this is what I used to think. Granted, I have a lawn tractor and a lot of lawn to spread out the mulched leaves, so YMMV, but I found that I can go from “looks like WAY too many leaves to mow-mulch” to “doesn’t look like a leaf ever fell on the lawn” in the space of a short afternoon.
Exactly. And even if you can see a bit of leaf litter on the lawn…so what? We need to get over our collective obsession with perfect green lawns andshift our focus to soil health, biodiversity and wildlife.
Putting an organic material in plastic bags and dumping it in a landfill is insane.
For me, I found our 46" twin blade Cub Cadet XT1 wasn’t doing much for the massive amounts of leaves we get in our yard. I considered buying the leaf mulch/collection attachment, but it is pretty pricey and has mixed reviews on the Cub Cadet website. Do I want to spend $300 for the cart and $400 for the leaf attachment only to find out it doesn’t work?
Last year, one of the home improvement big box stores had a deal on a Husqvarna high powered gas backpack blower. I picked one up for either 199 or 299, and that thing has been a godsend. I can now clear (or at least blow into a big pile) our entire acre of leaves piled a foot thick in under an hour.
My procedure is to now mow the lawn with the tractor until I get to the part of the season where the leaves start piling thick on the grass, maybe beyond 2-3" deep. Then I switch to the blow/chute/bag system and only have to spend maybe 1-2 hours a week with minimal physical labor.
Same here. Been mulching them up for over 10 years now and my lawn no worst off than my neighbors who labor over constantly. Sometimes I have to mulch over it twice but it still beats raking, bagging, taking them to the street or whatever.
It’s not “a little leaf litter”, it’s about an inch of leaf litter over the front yard. Used to be more over the back, but some trees have died/been removed. It suffocates the grass.
But I don’t put it in a landfill. Some of it goes into a giant leaf pile in the back yard (which my husband puts compostable kitchen scraps into) and some of it gets piled up around the base of the shrubs, and over the raspberry bed. It’s nice clean mulch, after all.
That leaf pile used to get larger every year, but since my husband started putting scraps into it, it rots down nicely over the summer, leaving plenty of room for new leaves in the fall.
We built a large leaf composting bin. We put a ton of leaves in there in the fall, even getting them from our neighbors. It does take some watering and some turning, but by the next fall, it is beautiful compost that we use to cover our garden beds with (we plant a lot of garlic in October and use it mainly there). It is work, but I enjoy that type of work with a pitchfork.
I don’t turn mine, or do any work. Just dump the leaves there. They slowly decay. They are out of the way. Disposal is free and environmentally harmless.
A fair number of leaves collect in my pond and rot away in there over the winter and following spring.
I have a catchment system where I just turn on a second pump for a couple weeks in the fall, and all the “muck” ends up in a 55 gallon trash can that I then either put in my garden in the years I have had time to have one, or gets spread out over parts of the lawn that it’s not growing as well as I’d like.
If I felt more industrious, I’d probably just rake all my leaves in there, but mowing them over is easier.
We’ve disposed of our fallen leaves via the mulch mower for a long time.
I also have a leaf shredder. You feed leaves into the top of the machine, which is essentially an electric string trimmer mounted in an open-ended barrel and you collect the shredded leaves in a bag at the bottom. They’re good for mulching perennials (whole leaves mat down and could suffocate plants).
Fallen leaves are just too good for mulching and soil improvement to bag and throw away.
I wish our lot was big enough to do something this way but we are city dwellers. Our retirement home has a lot more space.
I use our lawn mower to mulch all of our perennials and our huge garden beds (we grow a lot of peppers, tomatoes, squash, etc) and then dump that into tumbling composters. We have four tumbling composters to take care of everything beyond the leaves.
That’s my backyard - a 20-foot wide band of grass, with a 20-foot wide band of very tall trees behind it that dump a lot of dead leaves on it in the fall. If I don’t pick up, the grass dies.
And yes, they don’t end up in a landfill - the city does weekly curbside pickup of paper yard waste bags and uses it to make compost, which it then sells.
Walnuts have a substance, juglone, that is poisonous to many plants. I have a large walnut in my back yard and wondered why I was so inept at growing a lawn under it. I would mulch up the leaves with my mower and leave some on the lawn, put some in my garden plot and till it in, etc. Ends up that I poisoned most of my yard.
I also found out that it’s put into the surrounding soil by the roots. All of my vegetable growing now has to be done in pots or wine barrels. Sure, there are plants that will survive under walnuts, but certainly not tomatoes or anything else we want to eat.