When the weather begins to turn cooler in the fall, it is important to clean your lawn thoroughly while fostering new growth. With fall, it is time to look at cleaning up the garden.
It is also an excellent time to assist your grass in recovering from being trampled upon during games of catch or even bocce ball played in your backyard this past summer.
With the help of these fall gardening ideas, you can lay the groundwork for lush and healthy grass in the spring of next year.
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Cleaning Up the Garden with These Tips:
- Take care of the leaves that have fallen. A thick layer of leaves is not something that turf grass can withstand very well. You can avoid raking the leaves if there aren’t many of them and just run the lawnmower over them to break them up into smaller pieces that will contribute nutrients to the soil.
- Plant seeds or lay down sod. In most areas, the best conditions for establishing new lawns or making repairs are created when cool temperatures are paired with rainfall that occurs later in the fall.
- Aerate your lawn. To prevent the soil from becoming too compacted, it is recommended that high-traffic areas be aerated annually; otherwise, aeration should be performed every two to three years.
- Maintain control of the weeds. As the temperatures drop in the fall, popular lawn weeds like dandelions and clover will flourish and spread across the grass.
- Raise your mower blade. Your grass will have a greater chance of surviving the winter if you let your lawn grow to a larger height and encourage more root growth.
Tools for Cleaning Up the Garden
To do the job of cleaning up the garden in the fall, several tools will make the job quick and easy.
Electric Leaf Blower
There are several practical leaf blowers on the market. We choose to review the following:
WORX WG509 Electric Leaf Blower
With the flick of a button, the WORX WG509 Electric Leaf Blower can transition between the mode of the leaf blower and the mode of vacuum and back again. Your yard will look much cleaner after removing the leaves and other debris.
Features:
- It is a leaf blower, mulcher, and vacuum.
- The leaf blower has two speeds for different jobs.
- The leaf blower is lightweight, making it a one-handed operation.
- It comes with an extension cord retainer.
- The leaf blower includes a 1.2-bushel collection bag.
Description:
This versatile 3-in-1 is the ideal solution for leaf and trash collecting. Instead of simply blowing leaves around the yard, you can suck them up and mulch them using the same equipment.
Fewer Bags on the Street: With an 18:1 mulch ratio, you may reduce 18 bags of leaves or trash to only one. This is because the all-metal mulching technique reduces leaves to 1/18th of their original size. That hardly seems like yard work.
What We Like Most About this Leaf Blower
We liked that the leaf blower is lightweight and easy to maneuver. It also has lots of power and, more importantly, blows the leaves in layers. Making light work of moving the leaves off your driveway.
What We Did Not Like About this Leaf Blower
Some reviewers found the on/off switch hard to engage when wearing gloves. As well, a couple of people would like it to be able to blow heavy debris such as pine needles.
Information Link: Worx Trivac Leaf Blower
More About the Leaf Blower
This leaf blower has a metal impeller that cuts in two stages. It can chop leaves and then mulch them as well.
You can also change the speed for going slowly over hard surfaces or around tight corners.
The leaf blower is light enough to use one hand as it weighs just over eight pounds.
The clever design allows using the leaf blower under lawn furniture or around landscaping elements.
Since it is lightweight, anyone can use this leaf blower.
No more having to rake leaves in the fall!
The leaf blower can blow leaves off your driveway and sidewalks and vacuum up or mulch the leaves.
One reason to use a leaf blower is that you can collect the leaves and add them to your composter.
Worx Trivac 3-in-1 Leaf Blower, Mulcher, Vac Review Video:
Cleaning Up the Garden and Using a Composter!
Start a compost pile in the corner of your yard in the fall to generate free, nutrient-rich fertilizer for the spring.
Layer “brown” leaves with “green” materials to blend high-carbon and high-nitrogen elements for faster composting.
Keep the compost pile moist and turn it now and then to aerate and mix the material.
Electric Leaf Mulcher
If you don’t get a leaf blower for your garden because it is too small or you like raking the leaves, the WORX WG430 13 Amp Electric Leaf Mulcher is a good addition.
The WORX WG430 Leaf Mulcher is a one-of-a-kind solution to a yearly issue: heaps and mounds of leaves in the yard.
It decomposes hundreds of gallons of leaves, turning them into a vitamin-rich, organic mulch that can be used to fertilize your flowerbed or garden. It does all of this in just a few easy steps, a very efficient way to eliminate mounds of green yard waste.
The WORX Flex-a-Line bladeless mulching technology mulches through leaves and debris with regular, heavy-duty grass trimmer lines rather than harmful metal blades.
Reduce the number of bags containing leaves, twigs, or waste to just one. It is possible to make the process of raking leaves from several acres much more manageable.
After that, you won’t have more than a handful of bags to throw away. You may also recycle that mulch in your garden or flower beds.
