When it comes to raking leaves, I follow the Leaf Percentage Rule. While this rule is surprisingly applied in many areas around us, it absolutely should not be the case.

For example, you can pass a drivers test by only knowing 75% of the traffic laws. What a huge hazard people become when they do not follow several laws of driving a speeding vehicle.

Here is a simple but seemingly hard to follow rule for merging into traffic. You should have ample space both in front and in back of your vehicle when merging or you should slow to allow time to seek a larger space to merge. When it comes to big city traffic and merging onto the highway, ample space appears to be anything more than the thickness of paper.

At the end of a soccer game where our team had been shafted by a bad call, the referee came over to apologize. He said he only needed to know 70% of the rules to pass the test, so that must have been one of them he missed. These applications do not makes sense and cause severe issues.

I feel my leaf rule is both effective and makes sense.

The Leaf Percentage Rule: The percentage of leaves which have fallen from the trees is the percentage of leaves that I have to rake off the lawn.

When I see about 75% of the leaves gone from trees, I make sure I rake 75% of the leaves up. More are going to fall or be wind blown back to my lawn anyway, often within minutes of my nestling the rake back into its cradle in the garage, so there is no point to being extremely thorough. When there are 95% of the leaves fallen to the ground, time to get them all up.

Just to let you know, it is October 11th in writing this and not even 15% of the leaves have fallen. The only danger to not raking is the idea that snow will come and cover the ground causing them to get plastered down a leave holes in my grass blanket. Since the earliest snow here was October 2nd, guess I am getting those leaves off the ground.

Have a Happy Friday.