Never-ending Leaf Raking

Steve and I spent our entire weekend working in the yard raking leaves.  Our city does a leaf collection starting this week.  They will come around to different areas and collect any piles of leaves at the edge of your yard.  Word on the street is that they come around 2x's, but we're not positive.  So we wanted to at least take advantage of the collection this week by putting as many leaves at the edge as we could.

We had a pretty good system -- I used the leaf blower in the front while Steve raked piles in the back and side yards.  The blower is easy to use and makes it nice that you don't have to bend over to pick the leaves up; however, when you get a lot of leaves blown together, moving them is a long and tedious process.  The verdict is still out on whether it is more efficient to just rake into piles or blow to the edge.

The next day, Steve worked on blowing leaves in our neighbor's yard to help them out while I went around and picked up the piles he had raked.  I have a very secret system of pickup up leaves involving a snow shovel -- so secret that no pictures are allowed.  Only a select few have witnessed the pick-up system.  I put the piles of leaves into our big rolling trash bin.  Once the bin was full, I'd wheel it to the front yard and dump it into piles on the edge.  Steve just wanted me to put it into a bag, but with my pick-up system, it was easier to dump the leaves into the bin. The extra work of dumping the bin was worth it.

We don't know when the city will pick up the leaves, we just know they started in our district today.  As I type up this blog, it seems that our trees have decided to drop the rest of their leaves. At times, it looks like its snowing leaves through the windows.  It looks like Steve and I have a lot more leaf raking to do.  Why can't the trees all decide to dump the leaves at once?!  At least this year, we're being proactive on picking them up; unlike last year where we were raking up soaking wet leaves in the middle of December because the previous owners didn't do it.

(Steve preferred to use the bamboo rake that his parents bought for us.  Unfortunately, Steve's raking is a little more intense than the rake was prepared for, and some of the tines came out.  It should be salvageable, though.)

(Me and my awesome leaf blowing skills.)

(Our pile along the edge of the yard.  I'm pretty sure we could double this pile just be raking the yard again.  Oh the joys of having trees!)