Grand Avenue by Mike Thompson for October 25, 2015

Unless your mower has a bagger on it like mine does.

Mulching the leaves is the best solution. Leave the mulch on the lawn.

Mowers mulch. The lawn loves it! I have not raked in 25 years. Do not understand why people rake any more. You do not see the leaves at all after mulching them with the mower.

Oh well.

there’s always a catch

We live in the woods. When we first moved here, our neighbor next door asked my husband when he was going to rake our leaves. So my husband said “We have 11 acres of trees, where do I start?” In the 30 years we’ve lived here, the wind naturally blows most the leaves off the small lawn we have and the rest gets chopped up when it gets mowed.

I used to rake or blow the leaves and bag them. Now, I finally got a mower that can bag or mulch, depending on how many leaves I have. It is still at the mulch level so far, but the leaf fall is increasing. I no longer have any trees, but there are plenty of them next door on both sides.

Penny Robinson Fan ClubBurn shed limbs in a wood stove, spread the ashes on the leaf mulch. That will produce a lye when it rains, neutralizing the tannic acid from the oak leaves, and the earthworms will compost the leaves into the ground, producing an inch of topsoil every decade.