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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

The point is to pile up the leaves so they can be manually collected, put in bags etc. The "suck" solution makes sense if you don't have a lot of leaves, but people with large yards or lot of trees need large bins or even trucks to collect the leaves after blowing.

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Why don't you just leave the leaves where they are??

It can ruin the grass.

The main problem is the obsession with grass.

I hate to break it to you but if you don't grow grass then weeds and mud will take over. The weeds bring insects and mosquitos and the mud is well...mud.

Letting leaves kill my grass was a terrible mistake, I'll never make it again.

Oh sure - you can’t just let it go fallow. You have to strategically decide what to plant that provides adequate ground cover, which is NOT simple.

Now, rake, blow, shake, snow, wait. That’s what grass needs and it is easy and looks good.

Or you go with artificial turf or something similar and that has its own issues.

Back when I had a lawn, I'd mow the leaves into the ground. But maybe that only worked well in that locale? (Now I live in the high desert, so no lawn.)

Why are you monocropping grass?? Plant a meadow. Make hill mounds with grass clippings. Plant a hedgerow.

Seems like we decided arbitrarily on the most destructive form of yard that has secondary effects of causing scientifically proven damage to humans around us with sonic blasts from our leaf blowers.

I use a me-powered rake for that purpose.

You can also have me-powered tax calculation and fill out all those forms manually.

For a lot of leaves, it's not a trivial amount of time. If that's your hobby, that's all good, but otherwise time is valuable and finite.

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