My Leaf-Raking Apprentice

Toby has been a fun addition to my leaf raking responsibilities this year. In a year or two I'll hand the whole job over to him. I'll tell him that he started raking leaves at the tender age of 4 months. He was around for moral support than actual labor back then, but over the years he's gotten more helpful. Now he's interested in raking the leaves into bigger and bigger piles so he can jump into them. I keep telling him that a half an acre of leaves makes a big pile, but he's just focused on his one pile that he rakes, jumps into, scatters, and re-rakes. Meanwhile I move on to other piles until my arms want to fall off. And I haven't even gotten around to where most of the leaves are yet. Here's to an exciting weekend of bagging leaves. And a random blurb on leaf raking in general:

Here's one blogger's opinion on leaf raking:
"Simply put, there is no reason to rake leaves unless you are collecting them to use in a compost pile or as a mulch underneath trees and shrubs or around perennials. This should be heralded as great news because it saves you an unbelievable amount of work. No more raking means no more blisters, sprained backs, wet knees from bagging and wasted hours of shear boredom when you could be doing fun things." (Jeff Lowenfels from the Anchorage Daily News--just from a random hyperlink I followed earlier)
He goes on to state that what you should do with leaves (and what I'll expect Toby and BJ to do next year) is run over them with the lawn mower and turn them into mulch. Great idea, except that now all the leaves have fallen and we have to get a new belt for the lawn mower, so I'm stuck with this task for at least another year. But I think the truth of the matter is that people still rake leaves on their own (instead of mulching them with the mower or hiring someone to do it) in order to have something to complain about (or something to add to the list of things to complain about). It's also a conversation starter, although a rather weak one, of course, because it doesn't go anywhere other than "Yeah, raking leaves sucks."

So here's to old-fashioned whining and more fun times with Toby tomorrow in the yard. We'll rake leaves, jump in piles, and hope that it doesn't rain before we can finish.