With Fall comes the lovely colors, the cooler weather, and a whole bunch of clean up. Already our small neighborhood is buzzing with the sounds of maintenance guys cleaning up the leaves with leaf blowers, riding mowers with leaf baskets attached, and leaf shredders. Typically our family does not hire anyone to do this annual clean up, we do it ourselves, but boy is it overwhelming. We have the biggest yard in the area I think…over 2 acres and about 75 trees. The amount of leaves is horrendous and for anyone not familiar..no you can’t leave them on the grass or you will have no grass come spring….just an ugly dirt patch. We tested this in one area of our yard and it still has not grown back any grass.
So our plan thus far has been to gather up the leaves and compost as much as we can in two big compost piles…the biggest one is about 20 feet long by 10 feet wide…fenced. But it is hard to get a good mixture of organic materials when you have that many leaves. We take what we can’t compost at home down to the county compost pile and that requires a lot of driving and there is the issue of how to gather the leaves without using a riding mower or leaf blower. Both of these products emit 10 times the pollution you would emit driving your car for an hour. I think we have that sorted out though with the Yardwise Sweep It Push Yard Sweeper. It is a simple push sweeper that collects leaves in a bag. It is very easy to use, even for kids. And of course we have good old lawn rakes.
Shredding the leaves means we have less trips to the compost center too, so this leaf shredder comes in handy. How do you handle fall clean-up? Got any tips?
Whenever I start complaining about the two seasons we have here in AZ, all i have to do is read a post about shoveling snow or raking leaves and I’m happy with all of this sunshine and more sunshine :)
Glad you found something that works for you. That’s quite a huge compost pile!!!! Would you post pics? :)
What about a raking party? Invite friends and relatives over, Bring Your Own Rake, and treat them to a raking party dinner, potluck, or something. Or get together with neighbors and take turns helping each other. With a lot of people raking it should go quickly.
I lived in AZ for over 20 years…I do really miss it sometimes! The heat is just too much for me…made me rarely want to go outdoors.
Ah ha! Another benefit of Kansas. We do have some woods on our property, but mostly it’s grassland – no raking necessary.
We will have to figure out mowing. They (Native Americans and lightning storms) used to use grassfires and there are still areas of controlled burns.
Of course, mostly we’re hoping to grow stuff we can eat! Or that we can feed to some animals…eventually.
Unlike Mary, posts about snow and leaves make me worry about our upcoming move to Arizona. Thank you for shairing, the Yard Sweeper is a wonderful idea and I’ll keep it in mind should we move back into an area with trees!
We rake the leaves onto an old bed sheet and then pull the sheet to where we want to take the leaves… (Granted we are only moving the leaves to a huge pile in the front of our yard to be picked up by the city, but it works for us.)
Here we do it just like Julie said. However, in my country I need to call the city guys and tell them that there’s a pile of fallen leaves … otherwise they don’t take it.