This past week Nature has done me a favour. We have experienced some very strong winds, and these have conveniently piled up all the fallen leaves for me in some great big mounds, which will make it a lot easier for me to scoop them up and put them in the leaf-mould bin. Of course I should perhaps mention that Nature has also toppled over some of my last remaining pot-plants as well as ripping off some of the smaller branches of my Philadelphus trees...
Best to get the job done early though, before the leaves go soggy, and before the weather turns cold. Collecting up frozen wet leaves would be the ultimate in unattractive gardening tasks. I do actually have an electric hand-held leaf blower / sucker machine, which I will put into action at some point, but I find that getting up the majority of the leaves is easier by hand. The collecting bag of the machine is quite small, and by the time I have automatically sucked-up a bagful, I can have manually collected three loads in my trusty trug-tub. I will use the machine later for "hoovering up" the smaller leaves, twigs and seeds from the maple tree which are hard to collect manually. I always have to be careful that I don't suck up the shingle as well - the leaf-sucker is quite powerful!
P.S. Got some of this done over the weekend, between the showers... (conscience salved.)
Don't think I've ever seen a leaf hoovering gadget. Sounds interesting. Is it for indoor and outdoor use?
ReplyDeleteHi Kelli; it's for outdoor use! Wouldn't recommend using the Dyson outdoors... I think mine is a Flymo one -- technically a "Garden vacuum" I think. A thoroughly noisy blighter too.
ReplyDeleteA garden vacuum--now that would be handy though I don't suppose it would help me much with the pine straw that falls into my garden in the fall :(
ReplyDeleteBecky, is "pine-straw" possibly what we call "pine needles"? That's to say the fine "leaves" of the pine trees. If so, the garden vacuum deals with them just fine, so long as they are dry.
ReplyDeleteThank you for leaving your blogspot address on the groweat.blogspot.com, Mark. I've just come to visit your blog. It's a great one, and I'll bookmark it so I can come again.
ReplyDeleteAnd, yes, "pine straw" is "pine needles." They make great mulch "as is." Bob--in Maryland, on the "other side" of the pond
I recently blogged about a weeding tool I have. It isn't available in places other than Australia - going by the comments. We have leaf blower/vacs here, but they don't appear to be available in the US. I thought globalization had gone so far that we would all have access to the same garden gadgets.
ReplyDeleteYour fleece-covered raised beds look like giant pupae! We used nature's leaf-blower too, we now have mulched beds! Am hoping for a dry and still day soon so that I can use our leaf-blower, though I use it on "suck" mode so that it collects and chops ready for rotting down. That's the theory, anyway...
ReplyDeleteWe have more wind blown neighbor leaves in our front yard. Our only front yard tree still holds on to its brownish green leaves. Under the leaves, I found a bee enjoying a blooming mum flower. I posted the photo on ourgardenplot.com.
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