No more raking leaves

Instead of raking leaves this weekend, we tried mulch-mowing them. To do it, you just run your regular grass-cutting mower over the leaves to chop them up. It works pretty well and saves a lot of time.

The left part of the photo shows untouched leaves and the middle swath shows the results of two passes of "leaf mowing". The mower shown is the CMM1200, a battery-powered electric model from Baltimore-based Black & Decker.

The benefits:

• faster and easier (no raking, no bagging, and no lugging bags to the curb)
  
• cheaper for you (no bags to buy and the cost of electricity to power the mower was less than 3 cents)
  
• cheaper for the county (nothing for trash trucks to pick up & no space taken up in county landfills)
  
• provides nutrients for the lawn

What's not to like?