How to Quickly and Easily Remove Leaves from Your Yard

When my husband and I first moved into this old house in the country, we were unprepared for all the leaves we would have to clean up. The house is surrounded by lots of trees and when fall came around, our entire yard was covered with leaves. We knew we had to remove them, because if they get wet and if there's too many, they will kill the grass underneath them. So we decided to just clean them all up at once when the trees were bare. We soon came to regret this because it took months of long, hard hours to clean up all the leaves and we still were stuck with dead grass.

Through a lot of trial and error, my husband and I have now figured out the best way to quickly and easily remove the leaves. Now we only have to work at it an hour or two each weekend and our lawn is kept free of leaves with our grass still growing. Here is how we do it.

As soon as we see the leaves start to fall, that weekend my husband will move the lawn, leaves and all. We do not have a mulcher mower or a lawn mower with mulcher blades. If there's a thin layer of leaves, the lawn mower cuts right through them and the grass with no problem. You can choose to leave the grass and cut up leaves on your lawn, which will eventually break down and act like a compost. However, my kids loves to play outside and it's easier for us to have a bag attached to the mower to pick up all the pieces of grass and leaves, or else our children are covered head to toe in them.

Sometimes, the leaves fall too much at once and they're too thick for the lawn mower to go through. This is when we have to dig out the rakes. If you have a leaf blower, then use that instead of the rakes. Although, those are expensive and we like to consider our raking sessions a workout session. We start on one part of the yard and we rake the leaves in a big pile. Then we take a big old sheet and pile the leaves onto the sheet and drag it over to our compost pile. Our compost pile is just an area in the back of our yard where we put all the fallen branches, sticks, grass clippings and leaves on.

If you don't have a compost pile, you can always throw them away, although this can get expensive and take awhile to fill all those bags. I've seen some people pile up the leaves and sticks against a big tree in their yard and that acts as a compost pile as well.

Go around to each pile and keep putting them on the sheet (as much as you can carry/drag) and dumping them in the compost pile. This part goes by pretty quickly and soon you and whoever is helping you will get into a good rhythm and routine.

It is not possible to pick up every single leave in the yard when we do this, so sometimes if some are left behind it's no big deal because my husband has to mow the lawn anyways. The leftover leaves get picked up in that process.

If you keep up with this and just spend an hour or two each weekend raking or blowing the leaves into piles, putting them into compost piles or trash bags, then mowing what's left, the process isn't that hard. This way you won't have an entire yard filled with leaves that you try to tackle in one day. Get the kids involved too, they love helping us and raking, it really does make a difference and makes the time go faster. Plus, you're getting in some good quality time as well.