When we bought our house about 7 years ago, the lawn was in terrible shape. I’m not a huge fan of lawns—-I’ve been slowly converting it to a garden—-but my wife likes one. Instead of going chemlawn like many of our neighbors, instead we started planting clover. This horrified my father in law, who spends inordinate amounts of time removing clover and dandelions from his lawn. Anyway, after years of planting clover and the occasional overseeding with grass seed in the fall, our lawn now looks very nice. And it stays nice even during drought (like right now). We also just mulch all the fallen leaves with a mulching blade on our lawnmower. So much easier than picking up the leaves, and you can barely tell that I did not rake them. Admittedly the lawn is not 100% grass, but who cares? This is not a golf course.