Scary Incentives to Rake Your Leaves this Fall

Ticks and Snakes and Fires, Oh My!

Cleaning all the leaves from your lawn can be a tedious and frustrating job. Especially when you spend the whole day raking your lawn, just to wake up the next day to a layer of freshly fallen leaves.

Or even worse, you haven’t been keeping up on your leaf cleanup, and you find some scary surprises hiding in your leaves! Insects, critters, and other pests love homes that don’t rake their leaves. Some of these bugs and pests can be are harmful, while others are not only creepy but potentially dangerous to allow to live around your home!

And let’s not forget,  leftover dried up leaves, can actually cause some serious damage! They may seem harmless, but unraked leaves left in your driveway can be the catalyst for dangerous fires around your home.

To avoid any pests, insects, and fires this year, have a professional clean up your leaves!

Leaf Clean Up

Is Raking Leaves Necessary?

While fallen, dead leaves will eventually break down, that process can take weeks or even months. It’s best to tackle this problem mid-autumn when most or all of the leaves have already fallen. The leaves covering your lawn block sunlight, which you probably know, isn’t good for your lawn. It’s best to rake and remove the leaves from your lawn or hire a yard cleanup service in the fall.

What Could Be Hiding in Your Leaf Piles?

Pests love to hide in fallen leaves, especially in the fall and early spring when they seek shelter from the cold air. The most common pests will be your typical beetles, caterpillars, ants, roaches, and other bugs. However, harmful bugs like termites and ticks will also find comfort in your leaf piles and begin to call them home. Leaves can even hold water that mosquitoes need to reproduce, and they do so in large numbers. The past few years have seen high activity for ticks and other harmful insects, they don’t just go away when the Summer ends.

Common bugs that hide in your leaf piles:

• -Ticks
• -Termites
• -Ants
• -Caterpillars
• -Inch Worms
• -Cockroaches
• -Beetles
• -Stinkbugs
• -Cutworms

What could be possibly worse than bugs in your yard?

The smaller pests aren’t the only thing to be on the lookout for this fall! Spiders, centipedes, mice, and even snakes are on the hunt for food before winter, and that means they will go wherever these little insects are hiding. These and other critters will live in the leaf piles until the weather becomes too cold outside, but then they’ll be looking for a warm place to take shelter. And don’t be surprised if that warmer place they take refuge in is your home!

Pests that thrive in and under leaves around your home:

• -Spiders
• -Mice
• -Centipedes
• -Millipedes
• -Snakes

The Dangers of Fallen Leaves

Lastly, while leaves typically will decay back into the soil, that doesn’t happen overnight. If the leaves sit outside and dry out for a long enough period of time without rain, they become an excellent source of kindling to start a fire. So if your intention was to potentially light your yard, car or house on fire, mission accomplished! Check out the news story below on how common it is for leaf piles to cause car fires.

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