I mulch them back into the ground. I had at one time 22 large trees on my small city lot and nothing but bare earth for a lawn. I raked every couple of days for weeks that first year in my house. I bought a mulching mower w/o a bag attachment. Now, after 5 years of leaf mulching, a few trees removed, I now have the most beautiful lawn in the neighborhood. My lawn went from rock-hard to soft enough to walk in bare-footed. I mow at 3 inches and rarely need to water, even during drought.
Studies at Michigan State University Lawn and Turfgrass program say that grasses can do well with at least 2 inches of mulched leaves. Now that I don’t have so many trees, I take the piles that my neighbors rake into the street for leaf pickup - and mulch up pile after pile into my lawn. Extra get put in my garden. I’m sure I look silly being the only one shoving leaves out of the street onto my yard! Mulching usually diappears within a day or so, quicker if it rains.
FYI - best kept secret in Ann Arbor is the city compost sold in the spring and summer by the yard. The stuff is gorgeous black gold! Almost as fluffy as peat moss and screened. Never, ever, buy topsoil if you have a municipality that will sell compost by the yard.
Depending on the size of your leafpile, this can be very dangerous. In general, once a car’s engine gets hot you should NEVER park in a pile of leaves, as it can ignite.
Well, I personally don’t really care about leaves unless they’re on the sidewalk (and that only for pedestrians), but my mother cares about them and B’s mother likes for them to be neatly done up. Makeup, nails, … er, no. Raked and such.
I got a shop-vac about a year and a half ago. One of the side benefits was that it was designed so you can pull the motor off and hook your tubes up to the exhaust as a blower. Since it’s electric, it’s much quieter than the gas-powered blowers. And with a 100-foot extension cord (a whopping $6-$7) I can use it anywhere on my lot.
I start off by blowing the gutters, then do the yard. The yard slopes into woods behind my house, and the first 5-10 yards are part of my property, so I’ve got an easy place to dump the leaves. I blow the leaves into piles, rake the piles onto one of those leaf cloths with the handles at the corners, haul to the edge of the woods, and dump. Doing this took about 2 hours two weekends ago, and 3 hours last weekend. What’s left, I’ll grind up when I run the mower over the yard one last time before winter.
“In general, once a car’s engine gets hot you should NEVER park in a pile of leaves”
I did NOT say that at all. I said that I have driven over them. This is not the same thing at all as parking on them. People drive over leaves in the street all the time. BTW, they also park on leaves in the street. But then Im not talking about a 4’ high pile.