To Bag Or Not To Bag? That Is The Question

In front of our blueberry colored cape in Westbrook, we have to good sized maple trees. For some odd reason, every year one of them drops all its leaves by the end of October. The other one is holding steady with full coverage and probably won't start dropping for a couple more weeks.

My tendency is to wait as long as possible for both to be bare before we clean up the yard. Oh I saw some neighbors raking and bagging into those giant brown paper grocery bags and of course that got me thinking we should probably get busy over at our place.

Then saw another neighbor just plowing through the piles on his lawn with the mower and mulching 'em up into hundreds maybe thousands of crunchy leaf flakes. So that made start to wonder which way to go with all the dead leaves on the ground this season?

Mainers...To bag or not to bag? That is the question. Should we rake and stuff or just shred and spread? Well, I decided that I would find an answer by asking the Google. I went to the search box and typed in "rake leaves or not?"

A bunch of responses came and I chose the link to an article from USA Today. I figured they're a reputable news organization, so this would be my best option for some facts.

The headline for the USA Today article reads "Raking leaves again this fall? Stop right now." You mean I can skip this back breaking finger blistering chore? Sign me up.

According to the article, it's best to do what I saw my neighbor with the mower doing.

"Environmental experts say raking leaves and removing them from your property is bad not only for your lawn but for the planet as a whole. "Just leave them where they are and grind them up," said John Sorochan, a professor of turfgrass science at University of Tennessee."

Sweet! I can't wait to feel good about flipping the lever to mulch and get to pulverizing. I'll have no more leaves killing the grass and the ground up pieces will help feed the soil.