Defend Your Turf From Leafy Intruders

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It starts with a trickle. A few curly brown leaves gracefully floating down. Just enough for a satisfying crunch on your walk to the car. Soon, though, the trickle becomes a torrent, and before you know it you are swimming in a sea of leaves.

If you're good, you'll be out before Thanksgiving, dutifully raking or blowing those brown devils into piles to be bagged or, even better, mulched. If you're not so good, you will procrastinate. "Why rake now?" you'll say. "Why not wait until they all come down?"

This approach won't go over well with the neighbors. They will start glowering at you and making veiled references to the homeowners association bylaws. They will leave subtle hints: A rake perched on your front porch. A flier for lawn services tacked to your door, the phone number highlighted. A neighborhood dog will go missing, and you will have the sneaking suspicion that he has gone into hiding beneath the towering leaf mass.

Of course, you know you should rake the leaves. You know that in addition to blowing onto your neighbors' yards and looking unsightly, they will kill your grass if left to sit. Still, you put it off.

And really, who can blame you? Let's face it, even with the host of blowers, souped-up rakes and handy leaf-collection devices on the market, ultimately it comes down to this: On the list of tedious household tasks, leaf raking ranks right up there with unclogging the bathtub drain and sorting socks on a Sunday afternoon.

But surely there must be some way, short of resorting to gasoline and a match (or hiring a lawn service), to make the chore easier. The good news is that there are, indeed, tricks of the trade you can adopt in your autumn cleanup.

"The key is having the best equipment that you possibly can have -- good-quality blowers and rakes," says Krisjan Berzins, vice president of Kingstowne Lawn & Landscape in Lorton, which has about 2,000 lawn-maintenance clients.

Kingstowne's employees use commercial-grade blowers that, at $400 a pop, probably aren't a realistic buy for most homeowners. However, there are many lower-priced blowers and blower-vacuums on the market that are suitable for backyard use.

For those times that blowers just won't work -- when leaves are wet, for example, or in hard-to-reach places -- Berzins says his crews never use wood-handled rakes, which can break and splinter. Instead he recommends fiberglass or synthetic handles.

Beyond equipment, Berzins suggests a little forethought. "We train our guys to survey each property and basically get a plan as to how they are going to tackle the area," he says. "You don't want to just start blowing into a pile and then realize you have to blow other leaves into the area you just cleared."

Instead, mentally map your start and finish points and factor in wind direction. "If it's a windy day, Mother Nature ultimately will have the final say," he says.

Berzins's crews don't bag leaves, but if you do, he recommends buying a device that holds open trash bags to make it a cinch to scoop in leaves. And if you can, choose a day when the leaves are dry and easy to move. "It sounds obvious, but if you pick that weekend where it's supposed to be blustery and overcast and drizzling, you kind of put yourself behind the eight ball," he says.

Of course, this is assuming that you want to remove the leaves at all. Can't you just dispose of them where they lie? Can't you just, say, run over them with your lawn mower and be done with it?

The answer is yes, and such a strategy can be good for your lawn, provided that you grind the leaves into pieces that are small enough to fall to the soil instead of resting on grass blades. "They will decay and increase the nutrients in the soil," says Scott Aker, the gardens unit leader at the U.S. National Arboretum.

Sadly, though, the lawn mower method works only if you do it frequently. Try it on two months' worth of leaves and you'll end up with very unhappy grass. "Timing is everything," Aker says.

Still, if your timing is a bit off, you can take a little from both methods, blowing or raking leaves onto a tarp and then dumping them on a driveway or other hard surface to be diced up by the lawn mower. From there, you can sweep or scoop up the pieces and dump them into a mulch pile. Or, even less work, "put a chicken-wire fence around an area of lawn, and mulch them right there with your lawn mower," says David Clement, director of the University of Maryland's Cooperative Extension Home and Garden Information Center, which advises homeowners on lawn queries of all types (800-342-2507 or http://www.hgic.umd.edu ).

Easier, yes, but still, it all sounds so exhausting. Wouldn't it be great if you could somehow avoid leaves altogether? "Don't plant trees," Aker says with a laugh. If that's not an option, he suggests designing your landscape so that it's more manageable. If you have a lot of trees, "develop it as a woodland area and let the leaves lie," he says.

And look on the bright side: raking or blowing leaves may be a pain, Aker admits, but "it's great exercise and at a time of year that it's nice to be outside."

Know Your Enemy

To keep a clear lawn in the Washington area, you can expect to be out with rake in hand every two weeks from November through February. (The experts recommend letting leaves lie for no longer than 10 to 14 days.) Your task may vary depending on the trees. Tulip poplars and red maples lose their leaves early in the fall, while red oaks and white oaks don't let go until January or February.

"If you're in an area that has a lot of oaks, you may be doing your cleanup later in the year," says Scott Aker of the U.S. National Arboretum. Beeches and oaks, especially red oaks, also tend to have leaves that are difficult to rake. "They just make a flat mat on the top of the ground, and that is much harder to collect," Aker says. "And they're very resistant to decay. So it's better to do it early and do it often."

If you have honeylocusts, consider yourself lucky. Their tiny leaves really don't have to be raked. "They just kind of melt into the ground," Aker says.