For most of us, yard chores are a necessity that is often despised.

A landscaper who loves to use natural elements in designing a yard used to promote bumper stickers with the slogan “Lawns are for Losers.”

How many of us detest having to mow the lawn and pollute the air with those exhaust fumes?

Or despise the back-breaking work of shoveling snow off the sidewalk and drive?

And what about raking leaves?

If you’ve ever wondered how many leaves there are on your trees, a USA Snapshot in USA Today used sources Nature magazine and American Grove.org to report that 200,000 leaves could fall from one large mature tree.  Time for a leaf blower?

If you have five large mature trees in your landscape, you’re going to potentially rake one million leaves, and what are you going to do with them?  It once was that you could pile them up and burn them, but that’s not acceptable today.  You pile them up on the curb and the municipality hauls them off to a yard waste site or landfill.  You can mulch them, too.

Mother nature takes care of the leaves that fall on forest floors.  They naturally deteriorate and mulch the woodlands, so why do we rake?

Odds are we want our yards to look nice and neat and clean.  Same reason we mow or shovel.

So as you  tackle those chores, appreciate the beauty of those colorful leaves as they gently float to your lawn and create a kaleidoscope blanket on the grass.