Well, I'm an impulsive person(mostly to my demise and wallet), and was looking online for leaf vacs and this one popped up. I ended up grabbing a DR that is one year old. It has a 25' remote hose, dual wheels, tongue jack and starts on the first pull. I need to buy the deck adapter as the PO only used the hose to suck up piles of leaves. Hoping to try it out this week and will report back. I may grab a bagger as well for mowing grass, but not until spring.
Well it’s moot but since I said I’d follow up, the final report was that the mulching kit worked great, only bogged down a little in tall grass. Sadly it doesn’t switch out very easily and because of flooding we have to wait a long time before mowing in the spring so I predict a LOT of bogging then.
OP, curious about why you don’t seem to have entertained mulching, is it detrimental in some way?
I've gotten to the point where I have someone else do the fall and spring clean up. A mulcher is your friend. Several passes with a mulcher turns 3-4 bags of leaves into one. Plus it leaves a little bit of the leaves to decay.
That little bit is critical. All summer long the trees are sucking nutrients out of the soil and if you remove everything you need to replace it in the spring. Fertilizers are mostly by products of oil and while they do provide needed elements to grow grass what they don't do is provide aeration leading to the creation of clay.
nematodes crawl all over decaying vegetation
and are in turn eaten by worms which do create the required aeration.
In summery leave some debris to help provide the soft soil we need for good grass. Not enough to smoother the grass and kill it. But enough to attract worms to aerate the soil.
I have a mulched on the current Husqvarna ZT but with the new lawn just installed, I want to remove everything and not "choke" the new grass. I counted and there are 84 trees just within the new lawn. That doesn't count the entire property and surrounding woods where there are thousands. The number of leaves that need to be moved a few times in the fall is astronomical! A blanket 2" thick covers everything because of the prevailing winds.
Looks like a mulching kit is going to be on the shopping list as well. It seems to be a game between the trees and myself. They win the daily battle, I just need to win the weekly war.
Clearly irrelevant now but here's the result, same power pole in both:
I get what you're saying about putting too much matter back down. Last year I waited until the end of the season to do one single mulch on our half acre with a 20 horse 48" rider. First of all it took me four passes on the yard, I had to keep backing up because the front of the deck would turn into a leaf plow and I'd lose steering ability because it was so impacted in there, and for the next couple months anyone who'd walked in the yard would track in little leaf confetti. We vowed to do it differently this year and so far it's a little better. Two mulch mows at 4" and while there's confetti, I've left the grass tall enough to kind of keep it under control. My hope is that if it's done early enough before a freeze, maybe the crumbles will kind of get stuck in the yard more.
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