Leaf Me Alone
My induction into suburban living
There’s a funny thing that happens when you buy a house, but don’t have acres of land. You have to rake and bag up the leaves.
I grew up in what I thought was the suburbs—and it basically is—but we had large-lot zoning mixed in with a lot of preserved farmland, so the lot my parents owned, and which most of friends’ parents owned, was several acres, with forested areas much larger than the front and back yards.
So when I was a kid, we would rake leaves, but then we’d scoop them into a trailer, hook it up to the lawnmowing tractor, and dump them somewhere off a forest trail deep in the property. When I first noticed bags of yard waste in developments, I wondered why people bagged up and threw out their leaves. It didn’t even occur to me back then that there wasn’t somewhere to dump them.
But I never really thought about this until we moved into our new house at the peak of the leaf-shedding season. And we have two sizeable trees. On our move-in day, we saw a neighboring house with a leaf removal service: come up in a big truck, gather all the leaves onto a tarp, and dump them in the truck. We got one of the guy’s cards, and looked up their pricing.
$300. For one day of leaf-clearing.
And two days later, it looked like they hadn’t even come.
So I bought a rake, borrowed my dad’s leaf blower, and got to work.
It’s kind of nutty to maintain a little patch of grass like this, isn’t it? But it’s the most accessible safe, green, outdoor space a lot of people have. Yet that is the case exactly because we largely mandate it. If fewer people had yards, there would be more demand for parks—little parks, everywhere—and more of a cross-section of the population demanding them. But in America, if you can afford the car-dependent lifestyle, you can withdraw from the public realm in some ways.
If you have kids or pets, you want that space. Or a really close park or beautiful public space. But those places are expensive. That’s because they’re valuable, not because they’re elitist. Suburban sprawl, as you’ll know if you follow Strong Towns, is actually very expensive, especially to maintain over the decades. But it has the illusion of being affordable, of being the everyman’s avenue to homeownership.
This is the argument against suburbia, isn’t it? There’s the city and the town, and then there’s the country, with the sort of large-lot suburbia I grew up in being closer to the country than tract-house suburbia. You have lots of working countryside and unbuilt land, and you have densely populated urban places, very close together. Suburbia pushes those opposite but complementary land uses apart and dilutes them. It’s that perfect compromise that pleases nobody.
These are my genuine thoughts, but they’re also what I was thinking as I filled the third leaf bag, and the yard looked no different.
Related Reading:
Have You Ever Seen a Nursery like This?
Fifty Million Private Realms Might Be Wrong
Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 400 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!
Our neighborhood in Charlottesville is hilly and the developer thoughtfully left as many of the old-growth trees as possible. There are many leaves, but not much traditional grassy-lawn area; as a result we are spared the misery of the fall leaf-blowing season, which is the bane of many friends' existences in town! I rake around the driveway and walkways, and compost a lot of leaves, to be sure. But I read that fireflies make their homes in fallen leaves, so when one of the endless parade of landscape companies comes to my door with an offer to clean up my yard, I tell them it is the Firefly Habitat and cannot be disturbed.
We have a large city lot (.18 acres) with a few trees. To avoid bagging leaves, we have a compost bin made of old pallets lined with chicken wire in one corner of our yard, tucked up against our neighbor's garage. In areas where the leaf coverage is heavy, I compost about half the leaves. Then I attach the bag to my lawnmower, scoop up about half of what's left, and dump the bag on the areas of my yard with sparse leaf cover. Then I mow over the entire lawn with the mulching plug in. You get to keep the leaf nutrients and the mower breaks the leaves down fine enough that it really doesn't look like you left the leaves in place.