Posts Tagged ‘lawn maintenance’
Mulching Leaves
As we near the latter half of the season of falling leaves, with the grass continuing to grow like summer, I find the sight of our freshly mowed lawn and leaves doubly rewarding. Mulching the leaves with the mower is a two-step process, usually, but it’s so, so worth it. With the mower deck rigged for mulching, I will mow some sections twice, crisscrossing the cut at a ninety-degree angle for best results.
I’d like to be able to say it beats raking, but there are places where the leaves get too deep, and I have to get off the mower and do a cursory sweep with the rake to get things to a reasonable level the mower can effectively chew through. It helps to run the blades at the higher speed setting, but I do that sparingly, or it’ll drain the batteries faster than I can finish everything I’m trying to accomplish.
Maybe the reason I find the look so appealing is that I know it won’t look like this for very long. Leaves will continue to fall, and grass will continue to grow. The last month of mowing grass these days comes with a question each time as to whether it will be the last time for the season or not. I always hope it’s the last time, but too often it turns out to be not so.
Thankfully, there are more areas of our property where leaves are the preferred ground cover than there are places I mow.
As we head into our 15th year here, I am a little surprised at myself for not converting more areas from mowed grass to natural ground cover. To my credit, I have stopped mowing plenty of areas that were mowed when we first moved here. Each spring, I try to select an area where I can reduce the dimensions of mowed grass by some reasonable percentage.
It’s a bit of a balancing act, because both Cyndie and I want some mowed grass, but we both equally appreciate the natural areas.
Here’s hoping it won’t be long before I stop writing about mowing for a few months. It remains to be seen whether the subject of plowing and shoveling snow will come up this winter or not, given the super El Niño intensity I keep reading about.
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