I am needing to either rake or mow my new seedlings and don't know which would be less stressful as I would imagine doing both on the same weekend would be too much for them?

I sowed 20K sq ft of TTTF on September 9th. It is coming in very well with the exception of a few clumpy spots which I added additional seed to a couple of times since. I have kept up my 3-4 times a day misting/watering in hopes of germinating every seed possible, but I am beginning to worry about over watering the earliest sprouts in order to keep the newer seeds wet so I am going to start cutting back my watering schedule starting today.

I have many large oak trees that are beginning to drop their leaves, plus all the straw lying about. The area is too large to blow and I either need to rake off some of the debris or mow to mulch it up (or should I bag the first mowing?)

Thing is we only have a riding mower and I have kept my ground so wet that our mower will probably make ruts in my new lawn. I could rake up the leaves and straw a bit to give the seedlings a bit more time to mature so that they can handle soil dry enough to mow.

Or I could buy or borrow a push mower.

What is the earliest you would consider raking a new stand of tall fescue? Is allowing it to get a tad too tall less harmful than flattening it with a riding mower, or is mowing more important than getting the leaves off it?

Or should we rake and mow on the same day?

There's going to be a whole lot of raking going on back there this fall and I don't want the leaves to get ahead of me and shade out my sprouts after all the work and expense so far.

I know my question isn't clear. I'm just concerned about raking too early vs. letting leaves start to accumulate vs. letting the soil dry out enough to mow. My first sprouts came up on Day 7 so are now almost two weeks old. It sounds too early to mow but some of them are getting pretty tall.

Thoughts?

I'll try and get some pics of "how tall" later today.