Time flies, just like the leaves following this week’s gusty winds and overnight freezing temps, and it’s once again time to rake.
Mankato is offering its annual leaf-vacuum service starting next week, and the job began in some sections of North Mankato as early as last week.
The service relieves homeowners of the task of bagging leaves, with most raking them onto tarps and dragging them the edge of the street. From there, the city vacuums suck the leaves up, chop them into smaller pieces and haul them away for use as mulch or compost.
Mankato generally provides weekly service for four weeks, aiming to target the period after leaves have begun falling in large numbers and before the first snowstorm arrives. If winter shows up late, the service ends around the time most leaves are gone.
For 2025, that means a kickoff on Monday and a planned final horn on Friday, Nov. 21. A map on Mankato’s city website shows which neighborhoods the vacuums will be working on on which weekday.
North Mankato’s service runs longer and is a little more complex, requiring people to check out the schedule on the city’s website. The vacuums show up in a neighborhood on two or even three different days of the week over the course of more than a month, returning anywhere from a week to two weeks later depending on location.
The first hilltop North Mankato neighborhood saw leaf vacs rolling through Oct. 13. The work is scheduled to continue through Nov. 17 in the earlier neighborhoods and Nov. 25 in the later ones, although city officials say they will continue collecting leaves until they’re gone or until snow makes further vacuuming impossible.
Both cities implore residents to keep branches and other brush out of the leaf piles because that can damage the leaf vacs. Twigs and branches should instead be hauled to designated yard-waste compost sites.
The two cities have different instructions on where the leaves should be placed for the leaf vacuums.
Mankato wants them on the street — piled in rows in the gutter adjacent to the curb.
North Mankato specifically instructs people to NOT put the leaves in the gutter, instead placing them along the boulevard on the lawn-side of the curb.
Mankato also advises that leaves will not be collected in alleys, asks people to avoid parking on the street on leaf-sucking day so the vacuums can reach the leaf piles, and notes that leaves shouldn’t be placed near the street corners because the vacuums’ turn-radius is too wide to reach the corner spots.
As always, people can still haul their leaves to compost sites if they miss their leaf-vac day. In North Mankato, that’s at 600 Webster Ave. and is open daily from 8 a.m. to dusk.
Mankato residents have to go a bit farther — to the Minnesota Paving and Materials compost site off of Third Avenue near Pilgrims Rest Cemetery. That site is open weekdays and, through the end of October, until noon on Saturdays.