One of the first things that anybody notices when they visit my house is the number of trees we have in our backyard. There are huge trees that tower over our house, two of which are in the middle of the backyard, while several others are scattered around the yard. They look beautiful for much of the year, especially during the fall when the leaves turn beautiful browns, reds, oranges, and yellows.
Unfortunately, when those leaves fall off, my backyard is littered with leaves. I did a lot of manual raking the first year I lived here and was out there frequently cleaning up leaves. Our town’s cleanup crew only comes once in the fall and once in the spring, so you have to put your leaves and sticks out on the curb by then. In the second year, I did leaf blowing and then put leaves into a wheelbarrow and wheeled them down to the curb. But I got some advice from a landscaper who was at my house about the best way to attack the problem, and all it took was to buy a tarp from Lowe’s.
Some friendly advice went a long way
I felt like a dummy, having not thought of it sooner
The landscaper was at my house giving me a quote to put up Christmas lights on my roof (mainly because my wife doesn’t trust me to go on the roof). Anyway, he saw the amount of leaves I had on my lawn, and I mentioned what a pain it is to fill up a wheelbarrow and drag them down there. He looked at me aghast and said, “Why don’t you get a tarp?”
I asked him what he meant, and he said, “Get a 10-foot tarp and rake the leaves onto that and then drag them down to the street.” I couldn’t believe something like that was so simple, and I also couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that earlier.
Seeing the amount of leaves that emptied out compared to how many would dump out of the wheelbarrow was a true yard work joy.
Despite being someone who tries to write about efficient ways to run a smart home and do things around your house, I failed to think critically about ways to help myself with this arduous task. I thanked him for his advice and the next day I went to Lowe’s and bought a 12′ by 16′ tarp (I can also use the tarp to cover some outdoor furniture over the winter, which is why I went bigger than 10 feet.) I got back home and got to work.
I couldn’t believe how much of a help the tarp was
It was truly a game-changer
We have a good-sized yard that is fenced in, so that my daughter and dog can run around in a set area. We added the fence as a home upgrade for this purpose. But most of the leaves fall inside the fence. So, I blew all of my leaves from my backyard to the outside portion of my fence for cleanup. I already have trees lining my driveway, so there are already leaves on the grassy outline of it. It made sense to try to collect most of my leaves in one place before I started to rake them onto the tarp.
I would use the leaf blower that I have to blow them all the way to the street, but I was passed down a push leaf blower by my grandfather, and it only blows air to the left. Having to circle around piles of leaves and try to work my way around and around to blow them all the way down a driveway would take forever. It’s not like a snowblower that you can oscillate which way it shoots the snow. This only shoots in one direction, and there’s not much I can do about it. I can use it in the openness of my backyard, but trying to go down my driveway or along the side of my house would be really difficult to move leaves in bulk in a straight line that way.
I laid out the tarp and, because it was a windy day, had to use two shovels, a piece of wood, and a broom to keep the tarp down as I started to rake. I started to just fling leaves with my rake onto the tarp and soon, a large contingency of leaves were in the middle of the tarp. I was able to gather large piles of leaves and collect them against the rake and into my hand and dump them onto the tarp. When it became full, I set off to the driveway.
Photo by Lachlan Ross from Pexels
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Dragging was easier than I expected
It alleviated so much pressure
I raked and put leaves into the center of the tarp as much as I could. I didn’t want to line the sides of the tarp, knowing that when I dragged it on a windy day, some of them might blow off. So, once the middle of the tarp was relatively full, I dragged it down my driveway.
Having purchased a decently sturdy tarp that is double-sided and has grommets, I wasn’t worried about it ripping or anything like that.
It was a pleasant surprise to see this large pile of leaves coming with me as I crossed my driveway, went down my front yard, and to the edge of the street. Then, I gathered some excess tarp and started to pull it up. From there, the leaves started to empty out into a pile at the street, right where the town requires them to be for pickup. Seeing the amount of leaves that emptied out compared to how many would dump out of the wheelbarrow was a true yard work joy.
Seeing the large patch of clean green grass was also totally worth the effort. I dragged my tarp back up to the next section of the yard that had leaves on it, laid it down, added the shovels and other weights and started piling up again. As I continued to clear leaves onto the tarp and then drag them down to the street, the realization of how many trips with the wheelbarrow it would have taken to bring the leaves down would have been more than double. I cleared a huge part of my yard in just a few hours.
I’m not going back anytime soon
This is how I will do this going forward
The more leaves that need to be moved, the faster it happens when you load them onto a tarp. At no point was I dreading needing to bend down, lift a wheelbarrow, bring it over to the street, and dump it before wheeling it back. Dragging the tarp was much easier on my shoulders, legs, and back.
Lifting the tarp and having it empty out was much easier than emptying out the wheelbarrow. As I was finishing up the job, I started to think about how I’m going to get ahead of this next year and start collecting leaves and bringing them to the street earlier in the process. Rather than having to do a large portion in one day, a few trips with the tarp over a few days should clear it much faster. One of my flaws might be that I get too ambitious about projects and then want to do them all in one day. But this is an easy enough task that I won’t mind throwing some headphones in and doing some tarp runs.
It was simple and it changed the chore for me
Using a tarp to clear away raked leaves seems like such a simple idea, and I’m happy it was one that was suggested to me. If you haven’t tried this yet, and you have a large yard that accumulates a lot of leaves, it’s worth a try. It’s worth getting a larger tarp to be able to drag the leaves in bulk. The tarp has already paid for itself in terms of labor, and I won’t be clearing leaves any other way going forward.
