Fall is in the Air

Fall is in the air and so are all the leaves. Well, they're actually ALL OVER my yard. I know I should have seen this coming, but we bought our house in March when all the trees were barely getting their leaves back. I loved how many trees we had in our yard because I was getting tired of all the pansy, just-planted-because-we-tore-out-all-signs-of-life trees in the suburbs. But with so many trees comes a bajillion leaves. What are we to do? I have a fence, so I can't just wait for them to blow into my neighbors' yards. Is it really worth it to put 100 compost bags of leaves on the curb? (I've seen the houses that said "Yes" to this last question, and I secretly judged them.)

"We laugh leaves in your general direction! Bwhahahahaha!"

My dad told me that if I mowed frequently enough, the mower would mulch all the leaves. I rode the John Deere around the yard a couple of weekends ago, and I was fairly satisfied to see grass in my lawn again. BUT a storm came that night and knocked all the rest of the leaves in my yard. I'm fully prepared to go back and mulch the yard again, but now I have to deal with the piles of leaves that have nestled themselves on my back porch. Mr. Deere can't get into these nooks.

Blerg.

My father-in-law has so graciously offered to lend us his leaf sucker/mulcher thingy to tackle this project, but we're going to wait and make sure the trees don't have any more leaves to throw at us. I think this will mean more compost bags than I would prefer to put out, but my only other option would be to collect all the leaves and make thousands of leaf pressings in wax paper. I'm pretty sure I'm losing country-cred either way since I should be burning all of this.

On a final note, HAPPY HALLOWEEN! I'm not sure if we'll get any trick-or-treaters out here (which is sad), but we have a lot of candy (which is happy). Maybe I should give out waxed paper pressed leaves?