Fall Falls

When Dave and I were first looking for a house, there were several "must-have's."  We ended up finding a property with most of them, too.  Well, one of them was "an established neighborhood."  In other terms, we wanted a place with big trees that had been around for awhile.  Which we found, and love, until every fall.  This is what our place looked like last week at this time--

Seriously two to three inches of leaves.  Dave had to rake the
driveway before small group so people didn't park in the grass!

So what do we do?  Why not just mow?  Too many leaves.  It would just take forever, even with a mulching mower.  Sooooo... it has taken a few years of trial and error, but I do say we have a pretty good system.  And we have a leaf mulcher-- so it sucks up the leaves and mulches them, helping us contain about 12 bags of leaves into four.  Pretty sweet.

First, rake into long lines, pull away from the edges, etc.

Then, Dave sucks up the lines with the mulcher.

Sometimes he has some extra help from Dekker and the
neighbor boys who we love dearly.

 

Toys from our sweet neighbors.  Dekker LOVES their garage,
and all the fun things they have in it.  He runs right over to it,
whether it's open or closed or even if they are out or not!

At the end of the day the yard looked great...

And the neighborhood fun just never stops!

We finally go inside when the sun goes down!

Today we trimmed that big tree we insisted we have, then bundled up all the sticks.  We'll still have to mow at least once and I'd love to get the flower beds trimmed back and cleaned out.  It's harder to do those, because the mulch makes it much harder to use the leaf mulcher (weird to use that word twice in one sentence).  Anyway, we love our house, even though we bought it in the dead of winter and had NO IDEA what we were getting ourselves into!  But for every ounce of yard work that we under-estimated, is by how much we love our neighbors and neighborhood.  Seriously sweet people who love God and love their kids and just welcome us and Dekker all around.  My neighbor once told me that his yard looked so good (I asked) because it was something productive he could do while his kids played outside for hours!  Now I completely understand.  

Maybe one day our yard will take shape!

On the journey,

Mae