Raking Leaves

I'll start by letting you know that this post is not meant to instruct on the quickest or most efficient way to rake leaves.  The purpose of this post is simply to inform you how we do it at the Smith house.  Basically we try to have as much fun as possible, and eliminate as much unnecessary waste as possible.  If it were my choice, I wouldn't rake the yard or cut the grass at all...landscaping, shmandscaping.  But for the sake of our neighbors, we try to keep a pretty clean yard.

As you may know, I've kind of been on a all-natural kick this year and have been trying to eliminate as much waste as possible.  So I've been raking leaves this year instead of using the mower to mulch and/or bag the leaves.  In my mind, raking seems like a better option than burning gas and oil in my 20 year old mower for many reasons.  It makes the neighborhood a more pleasant place by cutting down on the noise and smoke from the lawn mower and leaf blower.  To eliminate using plastic bags that get thrown into a landfill, we are piling the leaves behind the hedge in our backyard.  Plus raking is good exercise for all of us!

Hang on a second while I step down off my soap box.......Ok, now back to the main point of the post - How we rake leaves at the Smith house. We started by spreading out a tarp on the yard.  I suggest using a good durable tarp for two reasons.  One reason is so it stays on the ground when the wind blows.  I'll wait until later to reveal the other reason.  

Emry has been interested in helping mom and dad lately, and she has been imitating a lot of things we do.  She did a great job helping us spread out the tarp and making sure it stayed flat.   

The next step was to rake the leaves into a big pile on top of the tarp. 

Learn from my mistakes #1...
While raking, make sure to keep an eye on your children.  They tend to fall off concrete patio steps if you don't pay attention to them.  I'm pretty sure there's like a 98% survival rate on falls from less than 10 inches high, but the screams your children will produce are still pretty terrifying.

 We also removed all the sticks from the pile as we were raking.  We didn't want to get poked by sticks while we played in the leaves!

Learn from my mistakes #2...

Don't encourage your children to help you break sticks and put them in your rusty metal fire pit.  I thought Emry would enjoy helping out her dad, so I showed her how I put the sticks into the fire pit.  Unfortunately, she could barely reach over the rusty metal side of the fire pit, and her poor little fingers scraped against the metal.  She got a pretty nice cut on the back of her thumb.  It bled a little, but she never cried!  We just rubbed a little dirt on it, and it was all good.

After we played in the pile for a few minutes, the next step was to fold the tarp over like a big taco.

 

Then we strung some rope through the holes on each corner of the tarp, and we set Emry on top of the big taco. 

The key was making sure she was placed directly in the center of the tarp so she couldn't fall over.  It kind of looked like she was sitting in an inner tube at the lake, getting ready to be pulled by a boat. 

This next step was the most fun for Emry.  We had to drag the tarp-taco around behind the hedge to dump the leaves.  The following video is pretty low quality, and sorry about the airplane buzzing overhead - didn't notice the airplane noise until I was editing it for the blog. 

You can't tell from this video, but Emry actually had a ton of fun riding on the tarp!  The ride in the video was pretty tame compared to the others. Unfortunately, I could not run as fast with one hand on the rope, one hand on the camera and one eye watching where I was going and the other eye on the camera.  Emry would laugh and clap her hands, but I just couldn't capture it here.  Earlier I mentioned there is a second reason to use a durable tarp...we obviously didn't want the tarp to rip with our child riding on top. 

The final step was to dump the leaves in the pile behind the hedge and take the tarp back around to start the entire process over.  It took us 5 tarp drags to do the entire backyard.

Learn from my mistakes #3...

Don't let your children play with your cell phone while you're raking leaves.  I let Emry play with my phone while I was raking, to keep her from falling off the patio steps again.  At one point, she set the phone on the tarp.  I made a mental note to pick it up before we folded the tarp over.  When I was done raking, I got so excited to give Emry another ride that I forgot about the phone.  Needless to say, I dumped that load of leaves and forgot about the phone until we were finished.  I finally remembered about 1/2 hour later, and Emry and I went back outside to search for it.  Maren had left the house and was running errands at this point.  If it wasn't for a perfectly timed text from Maren, we would have never found it.  Not more than two seconds after I walked around the hedge, Maren sent the glorious text.  The audio signal allowed us to drastically narrow our search, and after about 5 minutes, we found it!  Below is the long pile of leaves I would have had to search through had Maren not sent me that text.   

We had a bunch of fun.  It actually took me a lot less time than it normally does to bag the leaves with a lawn mower! The only thing I haven't figured out yet is what to do with the pile of leaves.  When I started, the idea was that I'd till them into the soil this spring, because we use this area to plant our vegetable garden.  However, the pile has gotten too large to till.  I would appreciate any ideas on what to do with these leaves.  Please give any suggestions in the comments below!