re: did your parents rake leaves onto bed sheets?

Subtle "I grew up on a huge property" brag

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To be fair it was in Monroe so....

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Oh just rub it in.

When I was coming up, there were 350 pine trees on a 1/2 acre lot, and we had to push the needles onto OUR OWN bedsheets. And a rake? We would dream of having a rake. Best we could manage was to tie the one fork we were allowed and our toothbrush to a stick. Then we had to haul the needed a mile down the road, over hot gravel, barefoot, into the trash fire, and breathe in the fumes.

Then we had to walk the mile and a half back, eat our dinner of pine sap stew with our fork, brush our teeth and put the sheets back on the bed.


But we were happy.

We just raked it in the front yard towards the ditch (rural town) and burned them there.
$20? We got $5 in the 1960's. I got food on the table and place to stay for all of my work.

Still do it. Dump them into the back of my pickup and take them to the town compost site.

This is why you have a mulching blade on your mower.

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did your parents rake leaves onto bed sheets?

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Yep, for a while. Then we started using these and there was no need.



And can't forget about these bad boys

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my two grown sons swear they will not ever have trees in their yards from the "limb and leaf parties" we used to have on a regular basis. live on 3-1/2 acres of hardwoods so it was a constant party during fall. i still use an old bedsheet and make multiple trips to place i put them. think of my boys every time im doing this and smile to myself wishing i could go back in time to when they were young and would roll their eyes at me when i pulled sheets out of shed ;o)

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i'll be real; this was the 1970s for me and i look back on those times with such fondness.

there was something simple and honest about getting a couple of dollars after working in the yard for HOURS and riding your bike to the 7-11 around the block and buying the biggest coke slurpee you could afford and riding around on your bike with one hand feeling the breeze and drinking that ice cold nectar of the Gods.

My old man would get one of those plastic kiddie pools, cut part of the front out, and tie a rope to it. We'd rake the leaves into that and drag it to the burn pile. It was good for picking up sticks, too, and could be dragged by the lawn mower if it got too heavy. One would last a year or so before getting torn up, so we'd get another one the following summer and repeat. We had several sycamore trees that dropped those giant leaves.

When the city limits expanded and pulled our neighborhood in, we couldn't burn anymore and had to bag them. So we would put the contractor bags into a large garbage can, rake the leaves into the green recycling bucket the city gave us, and dumped it into the can. We never used that bucket for recycling. We then used the kiddie pool to bring that bags up to the road for pick-up, dragging it up there on the back of the mower.