Oh man, I agree. My parents' neighbor was blowing leaves one morning when I was visiting recently. I went over and asked him to stop, and offered to rake the leaves myself. He agreed; I got to play in leaves. Win/win.

I don't think that works on the larger scale, though.

I hate leaf blowers. I actually don't mind sweeping and raking leaves. Of course, it's only been three times so far that I've had to do this under the magnolia tree. Ask me next week...

Messy, messy tree. But it's an nice to be outside, smelling the autumn air, getting some activity, and seeing the misty November day. It's an embrace of seasonal change, and a chance to be zen or something.

And quiet.

See...I always thought leaf blowers were REALLY dumb and annoying too, but now I have a gravel driveway that gets covered in leaves. I have no idea how much gravel I raked into bags this year. It did occur to me that IF I had a leaf blower...it might work to get the leaves off the gravel and onto the grass, where I could just throw away leaves...and not rocks!

Agree. They are insidious.

Hate them terribly. Spend $100 to operate a noise machine which pollutes and takes at least as long as raking, to miss that exercise, too?...I just don't understand it and the noise make me crazed.

I hate them just a teensy bit more than cars that beep for reasons other than that they're about to run into you.

like richat, we recently installed a bunch of gravel landscape mulch, due to drainage concerns.

unlike a lot of people, we considered the environment and bought an electric leaf blower / vacuum / mulcher.

it's about ten times quieter than the gas powered ones, doesn't stink and doesn't suck.

we also have a lot of small sticks / twigs that get brought down along with the leaves in the snow/wind storms here, which makes it a lot harder to rake.

so, you know, there are different opinions out there.

the gas powered ones are pretty awful.