The Falling Leaves...Different Approaches [View all]

[MineralMan]

There's a monster in my front yard. A silver maple tree that is now a year short of being 60 years old. The nice people who built the house I'm living in planted it in 1954, in the hope that it would eventually provide welcome shade and beauty. And so it does. It's a marvelous and enormous tree. A tree of much character and girth. It even provides a gallon or so of maple syrup in good years, when I bother to tap it and boil down the resulting fluid.

Still, that monster has a terrible habit. Every year, sometime in early November, it drops all of its leaves, creating a 2" thick layer of debris on my yard and, sometimes, my neighbors' yards. Now, they have their own trees. One a sugar maple and the other an elm of the same vintage of my own tree. Lots of leaves. Falling leaves are the responsibility of those whose lawns they fall on. That is the rule.

My maple is also a prolific producer of helicopter like seeds in the spring, which conveniently fall just as the squirrels are weaning the young of the year. The soft, mealy maple seeds are their first real food. But, I digress.

Faced with thick carpets of leaves, my neighbors find different ways to deal with them. One rakes his yard multiple times each Fall, carefully removing and bagging every last leaf from his carefully groomed lawn. I see him out there bending over to pick up strays, one at a time, and putting them in the approved, biodegradable bag for pickup at a rather high price. I admire his industry and fastidiousness, but do not possess such qualities.

Another neighbor called a company to deal with her leafy carpet. They showed up with a large truck, complete with an 8" diameter hose, a mulching grinder, and a powerful vacuum. A helper raked the leaves to the guy with the hose, who vacuumed them up to be turned into leafy bits for mulching. I inquired about the price of this service. $150. I think not, for me at least. I need a new parka this year.

Another neighbor, defying the city's notice not to rake leaves into the street gutters prior to the annual fall street sweeping, took her electric leaf blower and blew an entire yard's worth of leaves into the street and gutter, where the street sweeper dealt with them the next morning. Apparently, the city's order comes with no penalty. This interests me to a certain degree. I shall consider it.

Down the street, another neighbor, nostalgic for the past, had all of his kids out to rake the leaves into piles on the city sidewalk. Piles in place, he poured a cup of gasoline on each pile and set fire to them. It made a pleasant smell, but that smell was interrupted by the smell of a large diesel engine when the fire department pulled up, hosed the fire down, and handed the man a citation for illegal burning. I'm not sure what the fine is, but he still has his piles of leaves, mostly charred, but still there, and now very wet. I think I won't try that method.

There's one guy on my block who takes a laissez faire approach to leaves. He leaves the leaves where they fall. His approach is much scorned in the neighborhood, but that's what he does. When he first mows the lawn each spring, the soggy, rotten leaves seem to disappear. Maybe he's smart. I don't know, but he is scorned, nevertheless. I do not seek my neighbors' scorn.

I haven't been rushed. I waited. My silver maple is the last tree on the street to finally lose all of its leaves. The wind blew strongly last night, and that finished the tree off for the year. So, after finishing my day's work on the website content contract I'm working on, I ventured out of doors into the glare of the sun and the brisk wind that was still blowing. I dumped a quart of gasoline in my lawnmower, pulled the rope and fired up its 6 hp engine for the last time until next spring. I lowered its deck a bit, fastened the mulching flap to seal it up, and mowed the yard twice. Once in one direction and again in the perpendicular direction to the first. It all took me a couple of hours. Two inches of silver maple leaves became an almost invisible layer of tiny leaf particles that filtered down into the grass.

The fellow up the street with the manicured lawn dropped by to warn me that I would kill my lawn with that much mulch after I got finished. I nodded politely at him and said, "Well, that hasn't happened the other years I've done this, so I'm not so worried, but thanks." Then, I let the mower run until the tank was empty, folded up the handle, and put it into the garage, way in the back, where it will sit until next spring. Winter is here.

Now, I'll give the snowblower a look, maybe change the spark plug, tighten all the nuts and bolts and I'll be ready for winter.

Everyone does things differently. Most of those ways work just fine. We all have different ways that we look at things, and that's just fine, both in dealing with seasonal chores and in how we look at other things. We're all different, but we all get along, one way or another. Diversity is good, I think.