5 Things That Make Fall Garden Cleanup Worth Doing

The pick

Adjustable Steel Rake

$29.99 on Amazon

A full-width lawn rake shreds perennials when you try to clean between them, which is why beds never get raked. An adjustable head narrows to eight inches for working between the sage and the peonies, then spreads wide for the open lawn. One tool on the wall instead of three.

Steel tines rake wet maple leaves; plastic ones skate over them.

The pick

Collapsible Garden Tote

$24.09 on Amazon

Fall cleanup generates absurd volume - spent tomato vines are mostly air - and hauling it a bucket at a time is why the job takes all weekend. A collapsible tote swallows a whole bed's worth of debris, drags across the lawn loaded, and folds flat behind the shed door the other eleven months.

Diseased vines go to the curb in it, not to the compost - blight overwinters.

The pick

Corona Bypass Loppers, 30 in

$29.48 on Amazon

Sunflower stalks, old raspberry canes, the shrub that doubled over summer - fall is when the garden's woody leftovers meet their match, and hand pruners just fold on anything past half an inch. Thirty-inch loppers give the leverage to shear inch-thick stalks in one bite, standing comfortably.

Cut raspberry canes at the ground and get them out - borers winter inside them.

The pick

Leaf Scoop Claws

$17.96 on Amazon

The slowest part of cleanup is the transfer - rake a pile, then move it eight scratchy handfuls at a time. Scoop claws turn your hands into grain shovels that grab half a pile in one bite. Silly-looking, five minutes to appreciate, and the job takes half the time every fall after.

Two trash-can lids work the same way, less comfortably.

The pick

Poly Tarp, 8x10, 8 Mil

$12.99 on Amazon

For moving a mountain of leaves to the leaf pile, nothing made since beats a tarp - rake everything on, drag it across the yard, tip it off. It also covers the compost through soaking November, blankets a bed you cleared late, and catches the shed's overflow. The most versatile twenty dollars in the garden.

Buy the heavy weave once instead of the bargain blue one twice a year.