I rake only the front yard. I bag the leaves and our Town collects them. They go to a town property where the bags are piled and turned into compost. Our Town requires us to use special biodegradable brown paper bags. I leave the back yard leaves, I figure they make good compost. Last Spring I paid a professional landscaper to do a full clean-up. His crew was so good, they even pulled up weeds in my flower beds. After they left, it looked like my entire yard had been vacuumed.

I don't rake anything. Eventually the wind takes them. (I live in a rural farming area.) Composting would be nice, I agree, Sue--not at this point. I don't think I've picked up a rake since I lived in NJ.

Just mow them into fine stuff, it's good for the ground.

my son has taken down about 30 trees in our front yard...pine trees so all they give off are needles and pinestraw...we're thrilled to have them gone it really has opened the lot up...lightened up the house...the other stuff gets blowed off the driveway quite often but we don't rake or burn!

Our landscaper does fall (and spring) clean-up. Our giant sycamore has its' own ideas about seasons. It doesn't fully leaf out until June, and it will not be bare until December. Sycamore leaves swirl over the snow until spring.

Sometimes we rake and put in compost pile in back yard.
A LOT of the time we rake them in to the flower beds.
And a lot of the time we mulch them with the mower,
bagging them and putting in to the compost.

We have many huge maple and oak trees. We rake the leaves into piles, then my husband chops them up with the ride-on mower, rakes again, then stores in covered containers for use in next year's compost.

@chisue - Sycamore is my favorite tree, so lovely and graceful in the winter and spring - wish we had one in our yard.

We have about 40 large Oaks so we have a lot of leaves. DH has been raking every fall since we moved here, but last year we bought one of the leaf-sucker things that attach to the riding mower. He wishes he had did that years ago! Our neighbor took a lot of those mulched leaves for his garden, but we usually burn most of them.

Leaves are free mulch. We live in the woods on 5 acres. Every year, I rake thick piles of leaves wherever weeds have become a problem and that takes care of them. Others are used to make leaf mold.

I don't waste a single leaf.

In the suburbs, our property is tiny, and there really aren't a lot of trees, so we just rake them out to the street and the town picks them up with a vacuum thingy

At the house in the country, we have a lot more space, many trees. We have a mulcher, but haven't had the time to really do the mulch thing. With having 2 homes to maintain, and DH working horrible overtime the past 3 years, we just use the leaf-blower to get them out to the street. I think the town picks them up with a front-end loader, there, but I've never been there on a day they were doing leaf collection. Once we move there full-time, we'll run them through the mulcher so we can return the nutrients to the ground.

The mower here mows them. At our last house when I was in charge, I would push them under shrubs and rake them over into flower beds in the back yard. Then I would pull them back away from the plants 6 inches or so. In the front yard I let them blow because the north wind would take them south to the city dug drainage ditch and they would go back into the ground where they should be. I don't like bags of leaves to go in the land fill.

I always raked them when I owned a yard. Then ran them through the chipper shredder and piled them for decomposing on the compost pile.

No leaves at the apartment to mess with....

:(

Moni

We put them in the composting garbage can. Before that, I used to compost them for my gardening, which I just don't do any longer.

I mow and mulch leaves in the yard area and leave them as mulch around the flowers.

Leaves are terrific for the lawn, either mow them and leave them there, or rake them up for compost. A master gardener here in town has his neighbours bring their bags to him and he puts them in the compost....as well as his own leaves. The more the merrier, he says.

I've gathered bags of leaves and keep out on the balcony and use the leaves to start my worm bins with. They love eating them.

DH mows them back in the grass, but neihbors that bag are our favs, cause we get theirs and add to the compost pile. Love old, bagged up leaves!! Can't imagine wasting them.

We're like Alisande, live in a rural area in the middle of 20+ acres of open ground. We do have leaves, from the trees, vines, whatever the case may be....Mother Nature blows them down and thru! Thank You Mother Nature!!

Don't you get 'snow mold' if you leave leaves on a lawn over the winter?

I've never heard of snow mold.