Is it OK to rake leaves into the street?
Asked by
Val123 (
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November 4th, 2009
We have about a million trees, and it would be easiest for me to just rake the piles of leaves into the street but…I don’t have a good feeling about it!
Our neighbor down a couple of blocks did it, and now they’re gone…..the leaves are gone, I mean. Not my neighbor.
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26 Answers
A big gust of wind and they’ll blow back at you.
Rake ‘em up and bag ‘em.
Leaves in the road are slippery as hell. Even when they aren’t wet.
I don’t know if it’s against any laws but I certainly hate when people do it. Some piles are so far into the street that I have to swerve around them. It’s just unsafe for drivers.
@Cartman You’re probably right. Although it wouldn’t bother me personally to run over leaves with my car!
@buckyboy28 Very good point.
It’s not okay. The leaves go into the gutter and clog up the city’s drainage system.
Make a compost pile instead.
Well a million trees would produce about a billion leaves, sooo… that’s a lot of leaves!
It depends on where you live. Where I am, leaves and yard trimmings, etc. can be left in the street (on the appropriate day), and they’ll be picked up…
If you live in a community that vacuums them up, then YES! If not, you could be ticketed.
Leave them on the grass for mulch. I never rake leaves here. They blow around and eventually crumble and keep the soil acidic, which my particular plants like.
@Val123 Yikes! You run over the piles? My mother always warned me not to, in case there were children hiding in them.
@Val123 I know. I would assume that their parents would warn them not to play in the street but I’d rather be safe than sorry.
@ItalianPrincess1217 & @Val123 the community abutting mine has curbside leaf vacuum pick up. We have seen kids playing in the piles on the weekends! Better to be safe. Sometimes dogs play in the piles, too since squirrels like to bury nuts in the huge piles.
We have a gazillion leaves – up to our ankles all over the yard and driveway and there are still a lot left on the trees. Even mulching them would result in way too much. I wish I could ignore them, but they eventually blow into our elderly neighbor’s yard and we can’t get over there to rake them up before she does it herself. She is seriously on top of it!
This is the neighbor, 86 years old, who was on her roof cleaning out the gutters and about gave my husband a heart attack when he pulled into the driveway and saw her. Shovels snow, trims her own hedges – she is a rock star.
@Val123: Did I mention that I have 20 acres of woodlands and am surrounded by equally large or bigger tracts of woods that belong to other folks? The leaves shift around but who cares? I do sweep them off a little bridge over my stream, in order to protect the wood from rotting.
@Supacase my grandparents were like your neighbor…they’d go on their neigbors roof to help out, too
@ItalianPrincess1217 @SpatzieLover Oh man! I can see how that would be possible! Geez.
@gailcalled You mean to tell me that you don’t go and RAKE your 20 acres of woodland? :) LOL! I think I’ll just leave ‘em. Oh. Ha ha!
Raking the leaves into the street is like saying “this isn’t my problem anymore, somebody else deal with this.” It’s about the same as taking your old couch or tires to the corner lot for some one else to clean up. Just bag them, it doesn’t take any more effort anyway.
@holden Well, couches and tires aren’t bio-degradable, so it’s not quite the same. I wish we lived in the country where we could just have a burn pile, because the idea of putting leaves in a plastic bag and sending them to the landfill doesn’t sit right with me either….I’ll just ignore them till they go away.
@gailcalled You need to get @Supacase‘s next door neighbor to rake your 20 acres!
@Val123 Burning can cause real problems for those with asthma.
@SpatzieLover Well, burn piles on farms, and burning in general is just a fact of life around here. They burn off entire fields every spring. We don’t even call it spring here! It’s “Burn season!” It’s not unusual for someone to call in for a day off because they “gotta go burn” (it’s not something you can do just any old day. Weather/wind has to be just right.) It’s cool-looking at night, the sky is lit up with all of the fires. So this is just not a good place for people with asthma to be!
@Val123 I understand. I’m from a farming family But, many communities are now banning burning due to the asthma epidemic (my community included). I love the smell of burning leaves.
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