For those of you who live where leaves fall, got any issues? Do you rake or mulch? Bag, burn, compost, rake into the street…? Are you the first on your block to clean them up, or the last?
I’m a mulcher. Our town has 2 free pickups each fall, if you put them in those big brown bags. Otherwise, you have to pay per bag. I just rake them out of the flower beds, and run over them with my mower. Started doing that after my son went off to college, and i found those big bags a bit too much to wrassle from the back yard to the curb.
I do it a couple of times each fall. So far I’ve done it twice, most of the leaves are down (and it has already snowed once.) But my neighbor to the north hasn’t done anything yet, so I won’t do anything until they clean up (or until I see a big snow forecast!)
actually grandpa used to mow his down and rake it about the yard for the grass next year ………here in ca we don’t get leaves much they tend to wither and turn to dust on the tree after the first freeze ……
I ignore them. If the weather stays warm enough that grass keeps growing and I need to mow, the leaves get mulched. Other than that - nothing - they stay where they fall.
I ain’t doing no stinkin’ raking. My yard is too big and full of pine trees. Pine needles are a bitch to rake. They’ve been falling along with pinecones for centuries and its okay by me. Mr.Wrekker sometimes rakes up pinecones and sweet-gum balls if they start to bug him.
I try to keep my flower beds cleaned out. Not always as successful as I should be.
We live in the woods, no one cares.
We have a mulcher/vac that hooks up to our riding mower. A couple of weeks ago, it took a bit over an hour to do the front and back yard. Now, most of the leaves are down so tomorrow, I hope to finish most of what’s left. When the cart is full, I dump it among the trees in either yard. With 3 acres, there’s lots of places to dump the munched leaves.
My Dad is one of those dedicated idiots who raked up not only the leaves, but also all his grass clippings throughout the year. Then he would pour gobloads of chemicals on the lawn to keep it from starving to death. : roll eyes :
At his place in MI though (Orchard Lake) there was absolutely no choice in the matter. You’d be raking in leaves up to your knees; it was more akin to shoveling snow in Colorado than any other leaf situation I’ve seen. I once filled a 44 gallon leaf bag just turning in a circle where I stood and reaching out as far as the rake would pull the leaves toward me. My brother was wise enough to avoid going up there in Autumn.
Most of the places I’ve lived (around Northern Virginia) I just mulched everything in. One place had a lot of oaks, which have acid leaves, so I’d sprinkle a light dusting of lime down and then do the first major leaf mulching of the year. I’m a firm believer in keeping everything as natural as possible, though. If it were up to me I’d have a clover lawn.
One of the nice things about living in an alpine environment is I don’t have to worry about mowing or leaves. I do pine for deciduous trees sometimes (heh).
Snow, however, is a different story. 55"s so far this year and it goes as far as I can push it.
We have a half-acre wooded yard with 90% deciduous trees (like most on our street). You can usually tell who has just moved in by their silly attempts to bag their leaves (you see about 20 large bags in front of the house one week, and another 40 a few weeks later). We did it too, the first two years.
Now, we just rake / blow / carry them to our wooded area in the back and let them turn into compost. We have a backpack blower and a wide broom trailer that attaches to the lawn tractor. The hard-to-reach areas are done with rakes.
When we bought the lawn tractor, we got the John Deere leaf-collecting attachment; it was entirely inadequate for the amount of leaves and the size of the yard, you had to empty the tanks every 120 seconds, which was as much work as doing the whole thing by hand.
Pardon the hijack, but that’s my plan this spring. Our “lawn” is largely moss and weeds and I refuse to put a lot of work into getting a putting green. I just don’t know how well clover will do in our crappy clayful soil. We shall see.
What I really want is the wind to take all our leaves into our neighbors’ yards! Is that too much to ask???
This is my first autumn in a climate with grass, in fact I haven’t had a lawn since the one at the tract house my family moved out of when I was ten years old.
We are on a dirt country road. The previous owners of the house kept about 3/4ths of an acre in lawn. There are sugar maples of enormous size, at least a hundred years old, so yeah we have some leaves. We raked them off the smaller front lawn and piled them around the lilac bushes. The others we left. Those lawns are going to be transitioning to meadows next year. Possibly with sheep.
One of my neighbors rotates his free-range broiler flock through his grass all summer and butchers them in the fall. The other, a retired gentleman, keeps his vast lawns mown like a baboon’s ass. Some places can only grow a pathetic fuzz of moss. Every leaf is picked up. It is his main hobby. I used to feel rather ashamed of our shaggy lawns – we only mow a couple times a month – but I’ve gotten over it.
We have it down to a science. My gf rakes any that I wont be able to get to with the riding mower. I run the riding mower over them, bagging the shredded leaves. When my three bags are full, I meet her at the planting bed where she wants them. She dumps the bags, I stay on the tractor so the blades aren’t being repeatedly started/stopped. We do this weekly until snow falls.
I don’t mind raking – I did a bunch yesterday so my back yard is a few piles. My city has a compost site where I haul them – this is the part I’m not to thrilled with. (I hauled away my front yard Saturday)
Neighboring city has curbside pickup (you just rake into piles near the street and they vacuum them up) – I would like that even if it would bump up my taxes (depending on the bump)
Brian
We don’t have many leaves to rake in our backyard, but they all fall onto a bed of small-sized bark chips which surround our trio of birch trees. Raking up leaves off of bark chips is a pain, and a lot of the chips get raked away in the process. Every year we have to replenish some of the chips. At least the area is small.