The War of the Leaves, Part II

Well, this is the second installment of my report from the front in the annual fall struggle with nature, although Saturday was the fourth battle in the long, hard slog to clear the multitudinous leaves from the grounds of our humble abode. This time, I have real photos of some of the prisoners taken (the photo at left is not of our house, although we have more leaves than the pile in the picture).

It was a hard afternoon, though it would have been difficult to find a more pleasant one: mid-60s and sunny. But I put in three hours of climbing around moving the leaves into piles and I decided I had earned myself a rest. So, at 4:00 p.m. I was out on the front porch cooling off. There’s something special about just kicking back with a good libation. Corky, our Beagle mix, was cooling it, too, sitting on the edge of the hill overseeing her domain. The squirrels were busy doing whatever it is squirrels do at this time of year. It was very pleasant.

We’ve approached this project in different ways over the five years we’ve been in this house. The first two Diane and I personally took the project on with a rake and trash bags. It wouldn’t be so bad if we had a level yard, or even one with some trees in it. But no, when we bought this house, shortly before the onslaught of the leaves in 2001, we thought being surrounded by trees on three sides was an asset. And they are in the spring and summer when they pretty much shield us from the rest of the world, except on the fourth side, which looks across the street over our neighbor’s roof at the mountain in the distance. But after the leaves fell and we realized how much trouble we were in, it was too late.

The folks we bought the house from, Ray and Lois, were very nice people, and they had built a nice little house on their double lot. The problem is that they had to carve out level land for the house to sit on from a substantially slanted hill and in doing so left a steep bank in the back of the house. Now Ray is an engineer, and he used his skill to design a series of tiers with landscape timbers and rocks to hold that bank, and in those tiers he put every conceivable type of flora that catches and holds leaves in the fall: You name it, Ray put it in. I’ve cursed him every year sometime during October.

Twice we had people come in and do the work for us, but they didn’t do it like we wanted it done, and they were expensive. So this year, it’s up to me and this year I decided to try a new approach. Instead of raking the leaves, a process that takes about 25 hours of work, I bought a new leaf blower/vac. I already had one, a gasoline model, but it just wasn’t up to the task. This new baby is a Black and Decker electric model that produces a 230 mph breeze that moves the deck furniture.

The Big Wind Storm and Small Wind Storm blew through the area in October. The Big one packed winds approaching 60 mph and the Small one packed winds of only 40-45 mph. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of twigs and limbs—some of which are stout ones—were blown down by these storms, and these twigs and limbs get mixed in with the leaves and get caught on things and generally make a difficult job worse. Unfortunately, the wind only blew more leaves into the yeard, and didn't blow many out of the yard. The rain and snow made the leaves wet, compounding/confounding the work to be done.

The process is to get the leaves off the hillside tiers and onto the deck, then off the deck behind the house, and then blow them across the yard and over the hill into the woods. This photo shows one pile of leaves that is behind the house that is about 13 feet long, five feet wide, and 3-or-so-feet deep. That’s the second pile like that I gathered up Saturday, and it’s the eighth one this fall. Say what you will: That’s a lot of leaves! I’ve got at least three more piles that size to go, and then I get to move to the front yard.

Compared to the back of the house, though, the front is a breeze. I knnow that I have everyone's sympathy! The good news is that the war will soon be over for another year.

Technorati Tags: Fall, Work, Exercise, Misery, Home

The War of the Leaves

Fall is a beautiful time of the year, with all the colored foliage, the crisp, cool air, and all that goes with it. But fall also brings with it the specter or war and all its ugliness.

It was October 14, 2006, the day of the first battle in the War of the Leaves. It is an annual conflict of reasonably large proportions.

Our double lot is fairly large, about two-thirds of an acre, but most of it is wooded, so the yard itself isn’t very large; it takes only about 20 minutes to mow the grass. Even with the weed eating added in it is less than an hour’s work most of the time. So, even though there are dozens of deciduous trees on three sides of our house, and even though those trees produce hundreds of thousands of leaves each year, clearing the yard of leaves each fall shouldn’t be a big challenge. Right?

Well, no.

The man who built and owned this home before we bought it was an engineer. He used his talents to do a couple of good things to the house, including designing and implementing a series of tiers out back behind a rock wall that lines the deck so that the steep hillside won’t slide down onto the deck, but he also selected and planted or installed every conceivable piece of flora and devices to catch and hold leaves after the fall from the trees.

So what should take three or four hours of raking/blowing/vacuuming takes far longer. In the past clearing the thousands of leaves around our humble abode has taken me and the boss 25 to 30 hours of manual and tool-assisted labor. We rake, we use the blower, we use the vacuum, we hand pick leaves out of the numerous plants. The weather is an additional factor, of course. Sometimes it's cold. Sometimes it's wet. And sometimes the wind blows the leaves back where they were before we gathered them into piles. The little good news about this ordeal is that once the leaves are accumulated, instead of having to bag them up we can just rake or blow them into the woods on the downside of the hill. And, there's the exercise element. I suppose all that activity is a good thing.

Incidentally, neither of these photos is of my yard, but the lower photo gives you a good idea of what we face each year.

So it is with not much enthusiasm that I look ahead to the successive battles in the War of the Leaves. I know I have everyone’s sympathy.

Technorati Tags: Fall, Work, Exercise, Misery, Home