2024, Family, gardening, home, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized

Leaving The Leaves

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Monday afternoon I saw our neighbor across the street mowing his perfectly manicured lawn and removing every single leaf that had landed on the grass. When he was finished, there wasn’t a single leaf on the lawn. He loaded the leaves into the back of his pickup and hauled them to the city bins. He can’t tolerate anything that takes away from the green.

Most of our front yard is a vegetable garden, so we don’t rake there or in the back yard. I swept the leaves that landed on the front stoep and sidewalk into the garden so we could go out in our socks and not get them full of dried leaves. During the night we had a very strong wind, and in the morning there were as many if not more leaves on the stoep and sidewalk. Neighbor’s lawn looked like it did on Monday afternoon before he had mowed. It was covered with leaves! He was out there again on Tuesday repeating what he did on Monday. There are still lots of leaves on the trees around his property and the neighborhood. He’s going to have a busy time until the leaves are all fallen.

I suppose our neighbor thinks our yard is a mess because we leave the leaves in the flower beds and garden, we leave the perennials uncut to promote pollinator hatching, and only cut back the peonies, daylilies, and irises. Sometimes our next door neighbor comes over and rakes in the flower beds on the north side of our property because she feels guilty that our flower beds are full of the leaves from her ash trees. We tell her that the leaves will decompose and insulate the garden, but she can’t let leaves lie, either.

Rakers in your neighborhood? Did you jump in leaf piles as a kid? How do you prepare your lawn or garden for winter?

18 thoughts on “Leaving The Leaves”

  1. Sorry about all the multiple comments yesterday. I have to stop doing this on the work computer. Clearly it doesn’t understand me.

    Being as how we are out in the boonies, there are no neighbors to worry about how the lawn looks. Kelly‘s goal is to keep all the leaves off the deck. And the landscaping rock around it. She’s also the one that cleans the gutters. She spends more time on the house roof than I do. She rakes a few areas, we do mulch them with the lawn mower.

    Waiting for the neighbors to get my corn harvested and I hope I will be able to chisel plow yet, that’s my goal to prepare for winter. Well, and get my shop done.

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  2. I have a chunk of the yard that comprises about 25% of the backyard where I put the leaves on a blue tarp and dump them in a huge pile. Yesterday my son went out with a borrowed leaf blower from my other son and blew all the leaves on the front yard into the blue tarp four or five times and drag them back there and started unloading while he was doing that was watching the kids out in the backyard and raking the leaves that were there. My guess is that they’re just a different type of tree in the leaves come off a little later than the ones in the front yard so he had finished blowing all the leaves in the front yard into the blue tarp. I had finished raking the leaves in the backyard into four or five piles , I also took down the tomato and pepper plants yesterday and dumped all the dirt from the containers into three large flower pots in the bottom of next year tomato plant containers I remember moving into my house that had the 27 oak trees and trying to figure out how to deal with the huge of leaves that we had there there was no problem finding a place to put them but getting them all rounded up large undertaking from the top of the driveway came down and told me just to leave them until they had all fallen and he would come down with his attachment on the back of the tractor that sucked up all the leaves and put them into large garbage cans on the trailer that followed, and it took him about 20 minutes to do the whole lawn if I was still there, I would have to buy the attachment that neighbor moved on. I’m not sure if it’s luck or not but I have moved on as well. My current lawn is very manageable this time of year and tend to think getting the leaves taken care of ben tour three increments is the way to do it rather than letting them all pile up unless you have that vacuum sucker or neighbors get upset that your leaves keep blowing into their yard. I guess that would depend on the neighbors , the right neighbor that might be just exactly what is appropriate

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  3. The old(er) neighbor two doors down from us has the showplace yard. I don’t know if he rakes leaves off his grass every day, but he’s watered regularly (irrigation system) all through the drought, so his green is green green vs. most of the rest of us on the block whose grass is “used to be green.” On any given day, he has the least number of leaves on his grass.

    I mulch my leaves, sweep off the gutters (we have leaf filter gutter guards but stuff still accumulates on top of the screens), and put some in the compost pile. We have dozens of gigantic trees in the neighborhood, so even after I mulch leaves, the next day you’d never know I had. My goal is to get most of the leaves at least mulched once before the snow flies.

    Sandra cuts down some of the flowers every fall but we don’t do much more than that.

    Yes, we jumped in leaf piles every fall! Lots of fun for some strange reason. We also made leaf houses in the back yard–basically floor plans where rooms were delineated by lines of leaves, with doors left in each leaf wall, etc. My wife remembers playing a lot of “Fox and Geese” in the leaves when she was a kid. I don’t think I ever did, but if so, I don’t recall.

    Chris in O-town

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  4. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    This year I hired a service to put my flower beds to bed, and to mulch our leaves, however, they were not done falling yet, so I don’t know what I will do with those that fall after the clean up. Up through last fall, Lou did all these things, which prompts me to appreciate all he has done for many years.

    Because of the lack of rain this process was extremely dusty. Lou’s PCA was here that day, and threw a fit because her car got dirty from the dust blowing around. I finally asked her to move her car and close her windows. I had no idea this would happen. So she blew up at me. At this point her position with us is tenuous after the “Leaf Fit.” To be continued…

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  5. We’re renters so we don’t have to worry about a yard. I jumped in leaf piles only occasionally as a kid–Dad was pretty goal-oriented in his yardwork–but I (and my housemate) still love to crunch the leaves on the sidewalk, street, etc. while out walking. We also crack the ice on puddles on frosty days. People inevitably give us strange looks, two middle-aged women playing with leaves and puddles, but as the Fourth Doctor said, “What’s the point of being grown-up if you can’t be childish sometimes?”

    –Crow Girl

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  6. I’m in a condo association so I have no say over the landscaping, mowing, or lawn maintenance. As far as I’m concerned, they could cut out about half of what they do. They’re here weekly, from May until the snow falls. I think the contract does end, possibly October 31, but I’m not sure. Then the snow contract starts. I think it’s really pretty here. There are oaks across the county road that are on fire right now, and the oak tree in front of my house is trying to match them with a combination of gold, bronze, and green. The Japanese lilac is golden this year. It’s kind of drab some years but it’s really golden right now. The honey locust was stunning a few days ago. It looked like it was creating light. It’s been windy and the little leaves have blown off. On Monday, the lawn crew came and vacuumed them all up with their huge mower, then they used leaf blowers and blew off all the driveways and streets, then sucked up the piled leaves in vacuums. I don’t care for it. I think it’s way too much maintenance. I’m in favor of leaving the leaves. Nature works best if we get out of her way.

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  8. I miss the smell of burning leaves, when people could burn their leaves in the days before the environmental impact was clear about the dangers of doing so.

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  9. Kelly and I were just reminiscing yesterday how when we were still dating and she had an apartment, on Sundays, after milking cows in the morning I would go back to her place and they had a groundskeeper that seemed insistent on weed whacking and leaf blowing outside her bedroom window early every Sunday morning.

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