Fall leaf tips fast, efficient and good cleaning

What is your favorite way to deal with the falling leaves? Share your best tips in the comments.

Autumn leaves are beautiful, but too far on the lawn in winter can kill the grass left. Lynn Ischay, The Plain Dealer

Alec McClennan, owner of kindness Organic Lawn Care in Cleveland, made ​​a two-pronged attack on the leaves on the lawn Chagrin Falls. Use both a rake and a mulching mower and advises its customers to do the same.

McClennan leaves in flowers meadow and chops with clippers beds. Then rake the lawn for small pieces of leaf fall to the ground; Pieces are on the compost heap. His method seems boring, but he says, is fast and good for the lawn.

"The leaves are good for the soil, remove it's crazy," McClennan said.

It's always a race to rake all the leaves before the snow is heavy sodden carpet. These layers of leaves block sunlight and air to reach the grass and promotes disease.

What we all need are tips and ideas for fast and effective ways to deal with the falling leaves, and you can read a little below.

Sources are on site How Stuff Works , organic gardening and Mother Nature Network . Some tips, was first published in 2013, were by Ken Collier, editor of the intended families Handyman Magazine and Sabrena Schweyer with Salsbury-Schweyer, Inc., a sustainable landscape design in Akron.

SCRATCH

Rakes are greener than a leaf blower to create the smoke and noise. Customize your rake on the type of the paper to arm you and your size and strength. Rake with metal tines last longer than plastic, but the plastic teeth are easier to make you stay on task more.

Get a large rake. Many hardware stores sell screens up to 30 inches wide. Look for a "non-clogging" rake teeth do not pierce the leaves, if you spend less downtime and carry a rake.

Always with the wind and the descent rake as soon as possible.

It keeps the whole leaves blown onto the stack by tamping. If you use a tank or other enclosure, leave it open to the side until it is through the collection sheets. In this way you can rake or dump directly related to the battery without lifting loads on the sides of the tray and your stack of sheets for walk-pedestrian traffic.

It takes less time to rake leaves on a tarp and pull the battery in your city sidewalk pick-up, or in an unused corner of a large property. This method is faster than the sagging.

So you do not have to create piles of leaves in different parts of your garden to pull or carry Plan full of leaves longer than necessary.

Bagging

Show plastic sheeting over grass and raking piles of leaves on it. Then use the plastic as a funnel to pour the leaves in a garbage bag or lawn.

You can also buy a ball of leaves, which is a lightweight plastic ball that allows you to select a large number of sheets at a time allows the use.

Mulching

 

Mulching mowers chop the leaves into small pieces that can be allowed to spread on the lawn or flower beds as fertilizer.

Change mulching mower to its highest position, remove the accessory bag and cut off the leaves and grass, so that shredded leaves and grass clippings remain on the lawn. If you do not have a mulching mower, buy a mulching blade in a hardware store - mulching blades have special serrated edges - and attach it to the lawn mower.

Planting runners or old lawn mowers are not as effective in crushing the leaves into small pieces as mulch mower.

If you use a lawn service, ask for a mulching mower in the fall and bag use leaves.

Do not wait until spring leaves and manure spread on flower beds. If you put the leaves in autumn in the flower beds, almost completely biodegradable in the spring. But if the leaves are not placed in the beds until spring, the decomposition process will compete with plants for soil nutrients when the plants need.

Oak leaves are not good candidates for mulching mowers because they break down slowly. Maple leaves of Elm and work best with a padded lawn mower.

Shock

Your neighbors may hate, but a leaf blower / vacuum is ideal for leaves that stuck hard rake in around shrubs and flower beds and other areas. The leaves are chopped and large quantities can fit on the stock blower / vac, so you do not have to be emptied every five minutes.

Sheets are designed small blower / vacuum for home use units not as powerful as the large units that the equipment used by professional landscapers. Take a large, powerful and expensive fan to blow the leaves into large piles, especially if the leaves are wet, heavy, or lawn. Small blower / vacuum cleaner is best for cleaning leaves from driveways and sidewalks or leaf rakes sucking corners where they can not reach.

Be a good neighbor and not turn blower / vacuum in the early morning or late at night, especially on weekends. Maybe your neighbors forgive the noise, if you volunteer to fight for their leaves, too.

Composting

Put the crushed leaves to work in your compost pile. Aside everything goes in a separate pile to decompose.

Mixture leaves species whenever possible. Microorganisms from thin maple leaves and dogwood moved the thick oak leaf-eating pile decomposes to leave.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and read it on the site of another person, please read the FAQ fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php# editors.