The right mower can make all the difference when harvesting leaves. This is a quick guide to know how do you pick up leaves with a riding mower.
Perhaps you’re thinking about whether you should deal with leaves at all this year. On the other hand, you must pick up your leaves if there are too many on your lawn. Because these fallen leaves are unnecessary things. That will be a threat to your lawn. That is why you have to clean up these fallen leaves with a rake or manually or by using a leaf blower to retain your lawn’s health.
Picking and raking the leaves by hand can be a time-consuming task. Therefore, you have to use a riding mower as a simple solution to get rid of leaves.
In this article, I’ll show you the simplest method for picking up leaves from your lawn in the most efficient way. So, don’t be in a rush; simply follow the directions. Let’s get started.
Best way to pick up leaves:
Using a lawnmower is the best way to collect the leaves from your lawn that fall from trees to ensure the lawn’s health. You can skip raking completely by mowing over leaves. If you have too many leaves on your lawn area, you can create a pile of these fallen leaves by using a leaf blower. And then, you can collect leaves easily with a bag attached to your mower. The lawnmower passes the leaves into the bag.
What’s the purpose of leaf picking?
Picking fall leaves from the ground of your lawn is one of the most important maintenance tasks. Because the leaves lying scattered on your lawn can be harmful to your lawn grass. It will be a barrier to the flow of oxygen, nitrogen, and sunlight from reaching the grassroots.
So, to protect your lawn from this kind of danger, you have to know the right time to pick up leaves from your lawn. In this case, a riding mower with an attached leaf bag will help you much better than any other tool. It will save your time and energy. And you can do this job easily and quickly with your riding lawn mowers.
Problems with keeping leaves on the lawn:
Keeping the leaves in your garden poses far too many difficulties. These are;
- Preventing the sun from reaching your lawn.
- Giving rodents and insects a haven.
- Fungi and other grass diseases can thrive in this environment.
How Do You Pick Up Leaves With A Riding Mower?
There are some conditions to use a riding lawnmower. You should maintain a preparation phase for your riding lawn mower to get positive feedback from this machine. And need to follow some precautionary rules when you use your riding lawn mower to pick up fallen leaves. Let us discuss how you use your riding lawn mower:
Ensure your safety first:
While riding a lawnmower, you have to maintain some precautions to protect yourself from any injury. Always wear long pants, safety glasses, and hearing protection to protect yourself from bodily injury.
Prepare your mower:
Before picking up leaves, you need to ensure that your mower is ready to work in order. So, it is most important to make sure there is adequate gas and oil. You should also check the moving parts. If the result is positive, you can use your mower properly for picking up leaves.
Start your riding mower:
After ensuring the efficiency of your riding mower, you can move to the next step of mowing the leaves with your riding mower. And the next step is to start your mower to ride. There are some parts you can use to start your riding mower. The parts are the key, brake, clutch pedal, and gear. So, climb up onto your riding lawn mower and sit down. Then, press the brake and clutch pedal, and finally, start the engine by turning the key.
After starting the engine, shift your lawnmower into gear and adjust it with your selected speed. To move in the direction you want, you can control it using the steering wheel. Each lawnmower has different controls. You need to consult your operation manual before using a riding lawnmower.
Picking leaves with a riding lawn mower:
During the fall season, the leaves that fall from the trees are scattered all across your lawn. It’s too time-consuming to pick up leaves from your lawn ground by raking process or manually. So, to save your time, you can do this job easily with a riding lawnmower. After preparing your mower and yourself to ride this machine, you can direct it as you want to pick up leaves from your lawn ground.
Use a leaf collecting system:
Here are some considerations when you start collecting the fallen leaves.
- Nowadays, most riding lawn mowers provide optional settings bag attachments. The bag is attached to the back or side of the riding mower. The attachment of a leaf bag with your riding lawn mower makes it easy to pick leaves from the ground of your lawn. The lawnmower collects the leaves from the ground and stores them in an attached bag. When the leaf bag is full, it shall be removed from the lawnmower and dumped.
- The attached bag size depends on your lawn’s area and the number of leaves on your lawn. You also need to be concerned about the bag’s durability when you buy it. The low-quality leaf bag can make a mess. Check our article on top quality leaf bag on amazon.
- But the most important thing that you need to keep in mind is the compatibility of the leaf bag with your riding mower. Because different types of models demand different compatibility of attachment.
- Leaf bagging will help you pick large and small leaves from your lawnmower.
Keep the leaves in the lawn bed for mulching purposes:
Turning the leaves on the lawn into mulch is a good way to deal with them. It can dispose and reduce the volume of a leaf pile to one-tenth of its original size. Your lawn tractor’s blades shred the materials into fine mulching that may be spread on your lawn. This method is used to remove the grass and create a higher nutrition content mulch in the lawn. The pieces of leaves which settle the grass blades are so small that the lawn can be seen as grass free.
Note: Things you need to consider when mulching.
- Don’t mulch your lawn if the covering of leaves is too thick. It can create suffocation for lawn grass. A lawn with too much material can result in bare areas. So, always avoid mulching in dense areas.
When to pick up leaves from your lawn?
With the help of a leaf collection system, a lawnmower can gather up leaves. It is very important to know the proper time for picking leaves from your lawn. Otherwise, your lawn will get threatened by the fallen leaves. These leaves that are covered the lawn area will be a barrier to your lawn’s growth and health. They will block the sunlight and oxygen flow from reaching the grassroots. So, you should know the right time to pick up leaves, understanding the conditions of the fallen leaves scattered around your lawn area.
- Dry leaves-the best time to pick up leaves when they are dry. With your riding lawn mowers, you can easily pick up dry leaves from your lawn. Your mower will get less stress in this condition than collecting fresh leaves.
- Bagging wet leaves-When you pick up wet leaves by riding a lawnmower from your lawn ground; you will find a problem in this case. At the time of bagging the wet leaves, the leaves may stick inside the bag’s walls.
- Fresh leaves-It is risky to collect fresh leaves from your lawn ground. Because the fallen fresh leaves might get stuck with the mower’s blades.
The best period for collecting leaves with your riding lawn mower is when they are dry.
Conclusion:
When you have a lawn, you should have some tasks in maintaining your lawn. And you should do this job to retain the beauty of your lawn, not only for the beauty but also for the proper growth of the lawn grass. But there are some precautions to using this machine in the right way. You should maintain this for your safety.