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Comment by nopelynopington | Hacker News Reader

I live in a very leafy area with a lot of deciduous forest cover, so we're no stranger to leaves. I have never understood leafblowing. It seems like such busy work. It's not hugely common here but I have seen people carefully shepherding leaves into little piles on pathways, battling against the entropy of a light breeze. I'm sure there's a good reason but it always just seems like the ultimate expression of man trying to conquer nature in every way

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Raking requires more back work and they are moving the leaves onto the street for collection.

But some people seem to get obsessed with it and do it almost every day instead of the minimum number of times required to accomplish the purpose.

Around here if you simply let the leaves stay on your lawn you’re going to have a moldy mess and dead grass the next spring.

Grass can survive leaves, I don't see dead patches on my lawn because I didn't move the leaves around

I have the opposite anecdote. I left a lot of leaves on our lawn last winter (by pure laziness) and it definitely damaged the lawn. Edit: it was a rather young lawn, I guess (less than 2 years).

This is directly contradicted by a lifetime of witnessing dead grass under regions of leaves which were missed the previous fall.

I live in an neighborhood with a lot of retired people, and I agree with the "busy work" sentiment. As soon as some leaves have fallen, you can hear them firing up their leafblowers. Why? Why not wait until there is a decent amount of leaves and ... use a rake? I really think it's because they don't have anything else to do and it gives them a sense of purpose.

I basically live in the forest and get an unreasonable amount of leaves each autumn. Most of these leaves are also from oak and do not decompose well, leaving the lawn a mess in the spring. Using a rake is unreasonable for me, and a leaf blower saves me many, many hours each year that I can spend better elsewhere.

> Using a rake is unreasonable

Why though?

It's generally a lot quicker unless you're a very old person

It's however infinitely more fun with the leave blower, I admit to that!

If you can clear my driveway faster with a rake than I can with a leaf blower, you are a superb athlete. Like John Henry.

Did you try rakes like this?

https://www.joom.com/products/681aed59eda2b001310d4e2c

A better rake will help me outcompete a leaf blower as well as better shoes will help me outcompete a car.

I'll tried a leaf blower only once (it was when visiting family) and I raked every other autumn day as a kid. Leaf blower was... extremely painful to use, for me. It felt like it took me 2x more time to achieve what rake would do effortlessly.

But a lot of it was probably familiarity with rake and a lack of skill with leaf blower. I am sorry ready to believe that technology progressed enough that leaf blowers are now usable. I'd like to see how it feels with wet leafs though.

Obviously, I'm not you, but at my previous home I had a lot of pine trees (so needles rather than leaves, and lots of cones to remove as well) on a corner lot (so effectively two front yards). I also had a mulching lawn mower.

During the fall and winter, I would mow two or three times. The mulching blade made quick work of the detritus and it was faster and less work than raking the whole thing. I'm far enough south that snow, while possible, was still a novelty not guaranteed to happen every year.

My main use case for a leaf blower is to blow lawn clippings off the sidewalks, paths, and roads back on to my lawn after mowing and trimming. Rakes aren't effective for such small trimmed parts.

My leaf blower is battery electric though so its a good bit quieter than the gas ones others use, although I do agree its still one of the loudest parts of my yard maintenance.

> Rakes aren't effective for such small trimmed parts.

Well, yeah, they have such big gaps because leaves are big. Have you tried a push-broom? That would be the first thing I'd reach for.

Sure, a push broom would work for the base task of getting the trimmings moved off the path, but then I'd want to disperse said trimmings somewhat evenly across the yard instead of just piled up at the edges. A push broom wasn't as effective to do the same while taking more effort and time. Especially since for the trimmings that went out into the street I need to get them up over the curb as well.

I used to use a broom before I got the leaf blower. The blower is way faster and disperses the trimmings more evenly across my yard than the broom.

I do end up using a rake though for leaves, as for actual leaf gathering usage the rake is faster and far more efficient at actually making nice, easy to handle piles.

They ruin the look of the lawn you have put 1,000 hours of work into this season.

Well maybe that's the issue, I don't spend 1000 hours on my lawn

Same here, it is crazy around Autum in Germany, I never seen anyone bothering with leaves back in Portugal, and worse many of those leaf blowers are diesel powered, so much for being eco-friendly.

I agree. Rake is far easier to get bulk amounts in autumn.

Leaf blower is still pretty useful for keeping things tidy, but I’m still embarrassed to use my battery one.

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