How often should you clear the fallen leaves off your lawn?

Why bother

A thick wet layer left over winter smothers the grass dead. A thorough-tier job. Skippable when life's busy, worth it when it isn't.

Why it's a range

Trees set the pace. Wait for most of the leaves to be down, then clear once, and a yearly job does it. Under a lot of cover you'll want to go over the lawn every week or two through peak drop so they never bury more than half the grass. The deadline is the same either way: get it done before the first snow that stays.

What the job involves

1. Hold off until most of the leaves are down, or under heavy cover go over the lawn every week or two through peak drop so they never bury more than half the grass.
2. Rake, blow, or mulch-mow. A mulching mower shreds a light-to-moderate layer back into the lawn as free feed; heavy or wet piles need raking or bagging.
3. Bag and haul, or compost the lot. Many towns run a curbside leaf pickup in fall, so check before you pay to dump it.
4. Finish before the first lasting snow, so wet leaves don't mat down and breed snow mold over the winter.

Do it yourself, or pay someone?

Yourself, for most yards. A rake or a leaf blower and an afternoon does it, and mulch-mowing a light layer is quicker still. Hire out only for a big or heavily treed lot, or if you can't be doing with it. Pro leaf removal averages about $160 to $290 for a standard quarter-acre yard, more for a full acre, usually billed by the hour plus a few dollars a disposal bag, with most charging an $80 minimum to turn up.

What skipping it costs

$50 to $500, and that's only if the lawn comes through it. Leaves left to mat down over winter trap moisture against the grass and smother it, which is how snow mold and the other lawn fungi get going. Come spring you don't get grass, you get dead grey patches that have to be raked out and reseeded. Spot overseeding runs about $0.10 to $0.20 a square foot. Renovating turf that's actually been killed off runs $0.75 to $4.00, so a few hundred square feet of winterkill lands in the low hundreds, and a full reseed of a badly hit lawn averages north of $1,000. A rake and an afternoon is the cheap end of all that.

Signs it's overdue

• Leaves cover more than about half the lawn, or you can barely see grass through them.
• Matted, slimy clumps of wet leaves that never dry out between the rains.
• Pale grey or pink crusty patches in early spring, where leaves sat all winter. That's snow mold.

When to start thinking about it

Give yourself about 7 days' notice. That's when Grumpty starts grumbling, so it doesn't land on you the day it's due. Mark it done and Grumpty sets the next one, every 12 months, so you can go back to forgetting it exists.

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