2024, Family, gardening, Mysteries, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized

Leaf Me Be!

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My gardening juju goes away in September.  Gardening in May and June really gets me going but by fall, I’m so done.  I think it’s because the stuff that needs doing in the fall is just clean up – nothing is going to leaf out or flower or even green up due to my work and attention.  And I detest the leaf situation the most.

My house and yard are in the middle of a weird neighborhood vortex; for some reason, even though most of the neighbors have the same number of trees as I do, way more leaves end up in my yard than the others.  I’ve documented this over the years. So so many leaves.  I’m not rabid about cleaning up leaves; I understand about leaving some leaves and plants for pollinators.  However if I don’t clean up some of the leaves, then I end up with masses of wet and sometimes moldy mess in the spring. 

But I hate raking and bagging leaves.  I’ve always hated it.  In high school, I was part of a church group that did chores for seniors and even then, I told everybody I would do any odd job but raking.  Once YA was old enough I bought her a child-sized rake and I co-opted her into helping — some years I even paid her. 

Now at the ripe old age of 29 she has decided that dealing with leaves is something important to her.  She adores our electric lawn mower and she’s been out several times now, mowing, mulching and bagging.  After a session over the weekend, she informed me that she will probably do at least one more pass in the backyard and once more out front. I haven’t asked her even once to do any of this and she hasn’t even hinted at any money crossing her palm.  It’s just amazing.

And don’t worry, believe me when I say all this activity does not denude our yard of leaves.  Plenty left for the pollinators!

Do you have anything you like to do in fall (or NOT like to do) to get ready for winter?

42 thoughts on “Leaf Me Be!”

    1. I loved fried green tomatoes and I have the other one in hardcopy that I’ll read sometimes when I get a chance to read it it looks wonderful, but it wasn’t available at the library. What the hell is the matter with us picking books that aren’t available at the library have fun. I’ll see you in the spring.

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  2. OT #2.

    Jolene Stratton Philo (sister of our Jacque) is doing a book signing this Saturday at Once Upon a Crime Bookstore in Mpls, Noon to 2 p.m. Jacque has said she will be there at least for the first hour, so if you’re thinking of stopping in, the first hour will be the best bet in meeting up with other baboons. Book is #4 in her West River Mystery series, See Jane Dig!.

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    2. I’d love to go and meet some Baboons, but we already have plans to go to the MIA to see an exhibit that’s about to close. Weekends are always so full!

      –Crow Girl

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  3. Oh my gosh, so SO many things to do and get ready before winter / snow. I’m working on it, amount the other things. None of them involve raking or leaves or yard work.
    Kelly does a little raking, and she will pick up the deck chairs and move to the shed. She dumped out all the potted plants and put those away last weekend. I keep an eye on the forecast and I see there’s some possible snow in the 10 day, but until I know it’s a snow that isn’t going to go away, I don’t get concerned . When it’s going to be here to stay, that’s when I start picking up hoses, taking off the outdoor faucets, Moving chicken water buckets, getting the rear blade hooked in the tractor, getting the snowblower in the shed, moving machinery, all complicated this year by the fact I’m still trying to finish my shop and I have piles of metal and lumber spread about.
    Working on it, it’s just slow going.

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    1. I’ve dumped most of the flower baskets but unbelieveably I still have two that are still flowering. One red and one white (I did move them to the same shepherd’s hook about three weeks back). I don’t even know what they are; I bought them at Target because I had a gift card. It’s wild.

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  4. Does anyone remember one of Dale & Jim Ed’s “commercials” was for Bud’s Bag-o-Leaves? Plastic coated leaves that you could throw down in your yard… didn’t need raking or something like that…
    I had it on a tape called “Our Favorite Bits” that was an MPR pledge week premium at some point.

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  5. We (mostly Husband) rake up what falls on our driveway and patio, and haul them to a place where you can dump yard waste for a nominal fee. I leave the ones in the boulevard gardens till spring for the pollinators, and I don’t do any garden clean-up till then.

    We finally got the last of the root crops harvested, and left one row of carrots to winter over – we’ll see, have had mixed results with that…

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  6. Walk in the woods, or anywhere outside, to acclimate my body for winter.

    My yard is also a leaf vortex, partly because we have a fence on the south and east sides of the back yard where all the big trees are. My immediate neighborhood has dozens of large cottonwoods and other trees that all had HUGE growth spurts this summer thanks to the record spring rains. 😦 So I plan on making at least one more mulching pass this fall, maybe two. Not a fan of doing it, but it’s better than mowing grass in July in 80 degree weather.

    Wife wants to buy a leaf blower (UGH! My least favorite power tool sound) to blow leaves off the garden plants and rock beds. She seems obsessed with doing that this year. Lucky for me, time is running out, so maybe she’ll forget and not bother. How we made it through the first 24 falls in this house without a leaf blower, I’ll never know! *sarcasm*

    Other than dealing with leaves, winter prep is emptying and storing the hoses, bringing in the BBQ grill, and trimming a few shrubs.

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. We inherited a leaf blower years ago from a neighbor who was moving. I think we’ve only used it once. Like you, it seems an aggregate amount of noise for the benefit.

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      1. I have two leaf blowers now, and will possibly be buying a third with dual batteries. Besides blowing leaves, they blow dust off machinery, they blow dust out of my shop, they blow leaves off the deck, they blow rocks off the concrete, I’ve blown dust off the cars— they have 101 uses besides leaves! 🙂

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        1. Kinda what I’m afraid of with my wife. She might decide to bring it indoors to do some chores (blow dust off the ceiling fans??? Get crumbs out from under the kitchen appliances??? Use it as a super cooling fan on really hot days???

          🙂

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    2. Unforunately, if you have landscape rock, a leaf blower/vac becomes your only reasonable choice. You can’t rake rock. Leaves on rock will compost and turn into dirt which slowly buries the rock and grows weeds. The rock was a mistake.

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      1. We’ve had rock garden areas for years, just redid a big section by taking out small pebbles and replacing with larger rocks that stay in place better. But I hear you about leaves composting and growing weeds. It’s a never ending battle, but easier because we had the landscapers put down plastic underneath, which prevents roots from getting too deep. Easy to pull out most weeds. We have to spray a few now and then. I can see the value of a blower for those sections. I have been able to lightly rake out some leaves from those rock gardens (but not all.)

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    2. Ugh! I remember helping Dad put up and take down storms and screens when I was a kid. LOTS of fun doing the upstairs storm windows from the inside–no ladder to climb up from the outside.
      *”Hang on to my feet, son, so I don’t fall out the window! ”
      *gulp!* “Okay.”*

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      1. Heavy is true. I’m glad that I’m still strong enough to lift them. At least these are the ones for the ground floor. If I had to climb an extension ladder to the upper floor with something like these, the job would NOT get done.

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  8. I live in a very small apartment which suits me and The Birds just fine. The single window is part of an art mural. The air-conditioner sits on the ledge, and I’m disinclined to take it out each fall. So I put towels around it as insulation against drafts plus that shrinky plastic film covers the whole window. I enjoy using a heat gun (I have no hair so no hair dryer) and watching the wrinkles disappear! It’s a feeling that’s almost as good as popping bubble wrap bubbles. A beautiful Spirit Lake coverlet serves as a nice curtain.

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    1. I managed to get through this past summer without putting the window air conditioning unit unit in my bedroom window. Cue the soundtrack from Rocky. So that’s one thing I don’t have to do this fall.

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  9. Since we’re renters, we don’t have any outdoors tasks this time of year. The A/C units have already been removed–much as my housemate hates hot weather, she also hates the window unit blocking so much light, so she inevitably takes hers out too soon. The 3M window film will be going up in stages as the weather gets cooler; the windows in my room will be the first to be insulated, with two layers of plastic (or 3, if I saved enough from the great spring window-opening to reuse as inner layers) and the bathroom window will be the last to be covered, for obvious reasons. Polarfleece blankets have been deployed around the apartment for kitty nests, though the human beds still need cold-weather blankets and quilts put on them. We will both be getting new winter boots, and I need to find my heavy gloves in the “safe place” I stored them last year…

    –Crow Girl

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  10. Cutting out the spent raspberry canes is a chore, and I have to do it crawling around on my hands and knees as the raspberry patch is so thick. We did that on Saturday. We really haven’t had a totally killing frost, and I waiting til then to trim up the peony bushes and irises. Husband hates vacuuming out the garage, but did so on Saturday in a cloud of dust and leaves. He also put away all his grilling supplies so now he can park his pickup in the garage.

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  12. Son moved out of the basement this week and that makes me responsible now for all the yardwork. I am waiting for my guy to come up with a snowblower for me because shoveling is a killer in those years when shoveling is required. My wife has been good enough to finish up the raking, other than that, I love fall and winter

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  13. I don’t have any fall chores anymore. I took the plants I was growing to the compost site weeks ago due to the busy fall I had. I don’t miss the black walnuts that would fall from the huge walnut tree I had in Waterville. I had to pick them up before mowing/mulching because it was a large hillside and it was like mowing downhill on golf balls. Then I had to figure out where to put them. Lots of them. Heavy bags full. The naturalist in me didn’t want me to take them out of the general area due to the possibility of transmitting a disease/parasite/insect to another place. I can be an OCD purist about things like that. Sometimes I took them down to our woods in southwest Steele County. Other times I took them to the compost site in Faribault, but I didn’t like to do that because I had to lie about what town I lived in.

    It was a leaf vortex in my yard too, but th neighbors to my west never did any lawn/leaf work at all, so theirs blew into my yard. *Sigh* I really didn’t like the fall lawn/leaf work either. Raking hurts my back, the walnuts were heavy. The leaves would float back in as soon as I was done. And I knew that mulching the black walnut leaves into the yard was just mulching the juglone into the grass and plants I was trying to grow. I did use bags of mulched leaves as insulation around the base of my house, but I don’t know how much good it did. I usually gave up at this time of the year.

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    1. Rise and Shine,Baboons,

      Most of the fall work is stuff I do not enjoy much. Two weeks ago Nurse Phoebe, the Corgi, started shedding, so a fall chore is brushing her out and keeping the hair out of the house. This is her first shed as an adult, and I gotta say, it is mighty impressive. Holding on to her is the most difficult part, while she squirms, wiggles and nips at the brush.

      Loading up mouse traps in the one closet where they come in for the winter is another one. We caught the first mouse Sunday. I hired a guy to do the fall clean up of flower beds, which is the way to go to prevent all the stuff Krista described.

      What I do enjoy is changing my routine to doing more textile art and polymer clay. Once the garden is done, there is time for that.

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      1. So glad Kyrill, like most terriers. doesn’t shed
        He has been a little annoying at night lately, though, after discovering that he likes being under the covers with his head sticking out and resting on a pillow. I rolled onto my right side last night and found myself nose to nose with him. His head was on my pillow.

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  14. When we got back at midnight the day before Halloween after 3+ weeks in Japan, we found we had essentially missed fall in Minnesota. When we left, the leaves were still on the trees and when we got back they were on the ground. The city of Minneapolis picks up yard waste until the middle of November, so there was little time to catch up on fall cleanup. I got the leaves raked and bagged and we cleared out the raised vegetable beds in time to get it all taken away last week. Now I’m wondering if I ought to put up the Christmas lights this weekend. I wouldn’t light them yet but it’s only going to get colder from here on…

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  15. I have an argument with myself about which plants to bring in and try to winter over. I don’t like to leave the tender ones out and let them die if they have a chance to survive indoors. When I bring them in, they can survive, but they don’t thrive in the low light.

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