It is just this week going to be warm enough at night that you could probably remove the leaves, because the pollinators have probably emerged. I saw two huge bumblebees in my yard yesterday, and heaved a mingled sigh of satisfaction and annoyance. As far as I'm concerned, the leaves can stay right where they are until they compost right down. But we have horribly tidy neighbors.

Last year's drought destroyed the lawn, which is now a mixture of alien sedges, invasive if pretty weeds like creeping bellflower, moss, and (hooray) violets and scilla. If the scilla leaves would just stay around they would be as good as grass, but they will disappear shortly as it warms up.

I'm dithering over what kind of bee-lawn mixture to order and thinking I probably should plan to do vegetables in pots rather than expect to have the cleaning out of the old raised beds done in time. The beds need to be moved, anyway -- oh wait. They do not. Our new neighbors are taking out all the trees along the property line. That's the first benefit I have seen to this horror. Okay.

Sorry to think aloud in your comments, but I wonder when I'd have realized that little fact about the raised beds, which I've been meaning to move for, I dunno, five years? Sometimes if you don't do anything, a problem will solve itself. Maliciously, in the death of trees, but still.

P.