One of the chores I hate the most in the fall is collecting leaves and putting them in leaf bags by the curb, as required by my township. Some towns allow you to just put your leaves in a pile in front of your house, but in my municipality we have to put all our leaves in paper lawn and leaf bags or large plastic bags during one or two weeks in the late fall and the township will send trucks around to pick them up.

I can’t just dump my leaves in a compost pile or even shred them into my lawn for mulch for several reasons. I simply have way too many leaves to do anything reasonable with all those leaves.

I’ve written about using your lawn mower to shred leaves and this season I bought and reviewed a chipper and leaf vacuum, but both of those methods ultimately leave me with a problem: once I’ve collected the leaves, how do I get them into the darn bags easily and without spending hours scooping them in by hand or trying to clumsily rake them in?

I’ve seen all the different “leaf bag holders” out there and most seem a little silly if not downright flimsy in how they operate and what they really do. Many of them are made for holding open plastic leaf bags, and I exclusively use paper leaf bags. And even if the bag happens to stay open I’d still be stuck with the daunting task of getting those leaves into the bag in an efficient manner.

Use a snow shovel to easily fill those leaf bags without a leaf bag holder!

This year I finally found a method that worked pretty well for me and made filling the leaf bags relatively easy. I collected all my leaves and filled about 15 large paper leaf bags by myself in a single afternoon using this method. Here it is:

1. Collect Your Leaves: Use a mower or chipper vac with a lawn bag on it to collect the leaves in your lawn. This not only makes collection easy, but it chips your leaves up into much smaller bits which means they are more compact and genuinely easier to move around. Dump all the leaves in on spot, building a big leaf pile. If you have to rake, then rake away but breaking the leaves down into smaller pieces really helps.

2. Begin Bagging Your Leaves: Grab a bag, open it up and put a handful or two of leaves at the bottom just to keep it steady and make sure it stands on it’s own. Sure, a leaf bag holder could help here, but I don’t think it’s really necessary based on what you’re going to do next.

Now here’s the super easy trick you’ll use to easily put your leaves into that leaf bag: use a snow shovel! A snow shovel is big enough and easy enough to lift a good pile of leaves. When you bring the shovel up to the leaf bag you’re going to tilt the shovel sideways and basically pour your leaves off the side. The side of most snow shovels fits quite nicely into a lot of of the paper leaf bags I’ve used. Even if the bag is only half “open” at the top the side of a snow shovel will still fit in easily. I also use one of those snow shovels with the bend in it that is supposedly good for my back.

Compress your leaves with a bucket and a few bricks to fit more leaves in each leaf bag.

3. Compress The Leaves: Don’t just dump your leaves in and close up the bag. You’ll go through a hundred paper leaf bags when you really only need to go through 20. I fill up one bag and then I take a 5 gallon bucket with a landscaping stone or two in it and place that bucket on top of the leaves in the bag. The bucket should way a good 8 to 10 pounds and all you really need to do is place it on top of the leaves in the leaf bag and maybe help push it down. Then let it sit there for a few minutes, compressing the leaves. While you’re waiting, start filling up another bag. After a few minutes remove the bucket from the first bag and fill it with more leaves. Feel free to compress them again. You’ll be amazed and how many leaves you can really fit in those leaf bags. One word of caution: don’t overfill your leaf bags. They may be too heavy to lift or they may burst open.

Fill and repeat again and again! I’ve found that if I do all my collecting in one spot first then I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do to fill the leaf bags. Be sure to build your leaf pile in a location where you don’t mind having some leaves left over. It’s almost impossible to get all your leaf bits off the ground.

You’ll be done in no time and ready to forget all about bagging those leaves… until next year!