Leaf blower philosophy
Margaret
This drought and drown approach to blog posting is a little peculiar, I must admit, but hey, when I’ve got things I want to write about they all seem to come at once.
It’s coming up to December. The garden is done. I’ve still got lettuces in the cold frame and I’ve still got lemon verbena in my planters, but pretty much everything else has been harvested, cleaned, stored, dried, pickled, frozen, or eaten. I’ve weeded out the majority of the vegetable garden and knocked down the raised earth ridges in which I do my planting. Now I’m ramping up for covering everything over with leaves.
Up until we got one and I used it for the purpose it was intended (we originally purchased the thing to help start fires in the fire pit) I was highly skeptical of leaf blowers. The gas powered variety are LOUD and smelly and, in my experience, the majority of the people who wield the things are putzes of the first order who only use them to blow leaves into piles of someone else’s problem.
But we’ve got these two trees along our west property line. An alder and a maple. Both original to the development of our neighborhood which puts them in the 45-50 year old range. They’re enormous. And healthy. And last year I filled, and emptied into my vegetable garden, my 90 gallon yard waste container TEN TIMES. They’re wonderful trees and they produce wonderful mulch-able leaves. And the dirt in my vegetable garden is stupid healthy because of it. But that is one guaranteed FUCKLOAD of raking. Literally a 2-3 day job at LEAST twice each fall.
So I use the leaf blower. It’s a wee (as compared to the gas powered variety) little electric powered creature, relatively quiet (as compared to the gas powered variety) and it’s pink. I don’t know why, we certainly didn’t purchase it because it’s pink, but pink it is. So I wear earplugs or my i-pod headphones and create enormous, waist deep (really) piles of leaves, and haul them around back to feed my dirt. It’s really quite a lot of fun. If anyone wants to come over and jump in a pile of leaves you’re welcome!
2 Responses to “Leaf blower philosophy”
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December 11th, 2013 at 11:26 am
Weird. For some reason this just popped up on my RSS reader as a new post even though it appears to be nearly two months old.
Anyway – I have no objection whatsoever to little electric leaf blowers. However, speaking as someone who works nights and tries to sleep during the day, when the fbxring landscapers are out there with their fbxring loud-ass gas powered leaf blowers I get a little homicidal.
The Seattle City Council is considering a ban on leaf blowers. I would be fine with the idea of a ban on GAS leaf blowers, but I guarantee that it would take about three days before some chucklehead decided that the solution to that would be carting around a giant, loud, smelly diesel generator to plug the electric leaf blower in to.
December 11th, 2013 at 5:57 pm
No, it actually was only posted a few days ago. For whatever reason WordPress decided to post it, or post date it as it were, to the date on which the post was written (i.e.25 October) instead of the date on which I posted it (which was something like 9 December). I don’t understand it, but apparently I’m not meant to.
Once last summer we actually had to go to the building manager for the dentist’s office across the street to complain that their fbxring landscapers had been out at 0700 ON A SUNDAY with their fbxring leaf blowers. That complaint seems to have stopped THAT little problem. Now they’re only out there at 0700 on weekdays (sigh).
And the grand total this year was 14 trips with my 90 gallon yard waste container. By my calculations that’s 1260 gallons of leaves.