Fall Cleanup

🍁 The Great Minnesota Leaf Panic

Every fall, like clockwork, Minnesotans lose their collective minds over leaves.
The first one hits the lawn and suddenly every dad in a 20-mile radius turns into a groundskeeper at Augusta National.

You can’t even enjoy a Saturday coffee without hearing the chorus of leaf blowers echoing through the suburbs. It’s like a swarm of angry bees with Craftsman logos.

We’ve got folks out there with headlamps and rakes at 8 p.m., chasing one rogue oak leaf across the yard like it owes them money.

And for what? Those leaves are literally free mulch. God’s compost! But no — we bag ‘em up, drag ‘em to the curb, and then buy overpriced fertilizer next spring to replace the nutrients we just threw away. Makes sense.

Meanwhile, the “leave the leaves” crowd sits back smugly with their natural mulch and happy worms — until their neighbors give them the side-eye for having a “messy” yard. Can’t win.

Here’s the truth: come February, your yard’s under three feet of snow and no one remembers who raked or not. So maybe, just maybe, take a deep breath, put down the rake, and let the squirrels handle it this year.