i tried this with the 50 foot sycamore in my back yard and the leaves didn't decompose at all. they fell and froze. then in the spring when things thawed out, they formed a thick wet mat that suffocated and killed everything underneath.

I really don't understand moving leaves unless it's walkways and driveways. Fallen leaves are the ways trees work and have always worked.

One year ago, in November, I bought a house in GA after 40 years in the West, and it's got a bunch of Ents on a 1/2 acre lot. Upon moving in I had no tools to deal with the leaves, and the house had been unmaintained all Fall, so the leaves had piled up everywhere but importantly, on top of the "grass". I have a long concrete driveway also, and the piles of leaves were kind of annoying there. Raking was... suboptimal.

All my life I have hated leaf blowers with all my being, reserving a special place in that hatred for the landscapers working in the middle of the night in Santa Clara on commercial property.

However I have friends who don't share that hatred and as a surprise housewarming gift I received in Dec. a 20V battery electric leaf blower. My gawd that thing works great, and it's not very loud, takes 10 minutes, so problem solved for the driveway, deck, steps etc.

As for the "grass"[1], wherever the leaves had piled up and matted down after the rains, nothing grew. It was just mud. I'm not interested in leaf blowing a half acre so after researching it I got a Honda mulching lawnmower. I mulched for the first time last week. Worked great! This week the leaves have piled up again. I'll keep mulching until the accumulation wanes but I'm optimistic I'll have more "grass", and less mud, next year.

I retain my intense hatred for gas powered leaf blowers. I've got a neighbor across the lake and that mutherfucker likes to blow his deck for I swear to god an hour once a week with a tremendously noisy gas blower. Visions of setting the thing on fire. Maybe I should buy him an electric leaf blower. He also has a very noisy Harley and one of those extraordinarily loud Mustang adjacent cars, so possibly that would be a fail. Oh well.

[1] "grass" Well there's some grassy stuff most places, and it looks like dozens of other species of ground covering plants. All fine with us, what I care about is cover and not growing too fast.

This right here. But then HOAs gotta have lawns which also take mowing most of the times by leisurely ridden gas mowers. The leaves on the lawn obstruct water and sunlight from getting to the roots of the lawn and makes the lawn look not green. So now you have to blow the leaves so you can mow the lawn or just mow the lawn to crush out the leaves. Either way there's double whammy of gas and noise ruining your weekends.

The one thing that helped somewhat is replacing windows on my house - new windows seem a lot better at noise reduction. I am also seriously considering synthetic grass and getting rid of the stupid Oak trees on my lawn - I don't think those leaves decompose soon enough!

FTA:

> shred most leaves with a mower, leaving them strewn on the lawn as mulch.

The shredding is a necessary step. Of course, this too is generally done by power equipment ...

If leaves are just left alone they cover your grass and kill it

Mulching leaves with a mower would deal with them just fine in many cases. The landscaper in the article doesn't need to cancel all of his fall cleanup contracts. Areas with dense oak trees however, might have so many leaves mulching would choke out the grass.

If you have a few leaves, sure. If you've got more than 1 tree that shit will pile up, clump together, and form a layer of slimy leaves that won't break down for years.

So does the weed'n'feed I pay for, and it's much prettier.