The trees don’t seem to be actively turning yet, except for a few trivial bunches of yellow on the cottonwoods. But, all of a sudden, we’re getting drifts of leaves in the yard.
Oh, boy. Leaf raking time!
22 view(s)
Fall
The trees don’t seem to be actively turning yet, except for a few trivial bunches of yellow on the cottonwoods. But, all of a sudden, we’re getting drifts of leaves…
One day, my neighbor and I discovered that when you run a mulching mower over leaves, they just… disappear. Last leaf either of us ever raked.
Well, the lawn folks we have (my personal indulgence) do manage to make the leaves disappear. But that’s only on the lawn; the stuff on the driveway is more of a problem.
I also tend to rake a lot of leaves into the garden beds, to act as mulch.
I went up Trail Ridge Road to Rock Cut and back last weekend. There aren’t a lot of aspens in that area, but the few I saw were turning color. That’s higher up, so the trees down lower should start turning soon.
As for demolishing leaves with a mulching mower, it depends on how many leaves you have. I had a muclching mower in Michigan, but there were too many leaves just to run over them, both because I ended up with leaf-dust so thick you could not see the grass, and because the leaves were so acidic, the lawn would have been harmed (Oak leaves will do that, I don’t know about others). So I bought a special leaf-shredding attachment for my mower and put the bagger on. That ended up being much faster than raking, and the debris was much more compact. Even so, it was hard to like Fall because just as I was getting really tired of mowing the lawn and looking forward to a few months without mowing, the leaves would fall, and for a month or so, I spent as much time dealing with leaves as I had mowing during the summer.
I’d ask the lawn guys how much extra to clean the fallen leaves off the driveway. I’m now of the opinion that having a lawn service is a quality of life issue rather than an indulgence if your lawn is big enough, and I’d put raking leaves in that category too.
Our lawn is not so large that it would be a serious hardship. It is, however, a job that I know to a certainty would not get done if I didn’t hire someone to do it, so …
Ditto with my parallel indulgence to Margie, a birthday gift of a few years back, of a housecleaning service to come in every couple of weeks to vacuum, dust, clean the bathrooms, etc. The burden is not so great per se, but we know that neither of us will get to it on a regular basis otherwise.
“A man’s gotta know his limitations.”