Oh What Do We Do In The Autumn Time?

You know the primary song..."So what do you do in the summer time, when all the world is green?" Well for us we enjoy a lot of shade. We have a ton of trees in our yard, and so when it is 100+ Degrees outside, we don't feel the heat as bad. But even though we enjoy our shade in the summer...we sure pay for it in the autumn. Why? Leaves...leaves...leaves. We try and keep up with raking here and there...and now with Brady being able to mow the lawn, he can mulch quite a bit for our garden on Saturdays. But it usually takes an entire Saturday, from sun up till sun down, to get all of the leaves taken care of. And that's only if those stubborn willows will finally drop their leaves.

I remember when we lived in Saratoga Springs and we had only 2 trees in our front and back yard combined. Brady came in one day and said, "Mom, when are we going to have enough leaves for me to jump in?" I knew inside, that if we stayed in that house he would probably never be able to fully enjoy jumping into a huge pile of leaves.

So moving into this house we quickly remidied that. The kids love spending time in our yard and every year they have a blast raking up piles of leaves and jumping or falling into them, and piling them up at the end of the slide to crash into, or even jumping on the tramp with the leaves that are trapped by the safety net. Plus they are good helps when it comes to getting the leaves taken care of. This year we tried a new system of raking the leaves onto big tarps and then pulling the tarps over to the garden area, where we had the Chipper/Shredder aimed directly towards the garden. Then we mulched the leaves and into the garden they went.

Even though I may complain about all the work, it really is worth all the enjoyment we get out of our back yard. We hold a lot of parties and BBQ's back there. So what do we do in the Autumn time? You can bet we are raking up leaves.



Jace and Zack playing in a pile of leaves. (I'm in the background checking out my raspberry plants I planted this year...hopefully we'll get a lot more next year.)

Jace wasn't too sure of falling backwards into the leaves.

Zack falling into the leaves.

Hannah started to figure out just how fun the leaves were.

Brady 'erupting' from under the leaves.

We would bury Brady in the leaves and then tell Hannah to jump in them...then he would quickly jump out to get her. She laughed every time, and never seemed to get tired of it.

Nate doing what he does best...work ;-)