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| Look Mom, no leaves! |
But no, I don’t begrudge anyone their devotion to sports, just please extend me the same courtesy and don’t begrudge me my lack of participation. And no, I really don’t get why people get so worked up that it’s not uncommon for disagreements to erupt into fistfights. People certainly get so worked up that you can walk into any sports bar at a time when any game is on and everyone will be screaming at the top of their lungs. But here’s what I really don’t get. My thing is film and theater, and it certainly is not at all uncommon in a writers or theater group for people to express such passionate opinions about a play or a film that tempers will flare and, on occasion, people will even walk out. But never … NEVER! … in my forty odd years of participating in such activities has anyone ever assaulted someone, or for that matter even gotten into a screaming match. What is it about sports that can sometimes so easily produce physical violence among fans?
So no I don’t get it. But here’s what I really don’t get. At least, as I’ve stated, I don’t pretend to know anything about sports nor offer any opinions about any specific teams or players. But certainly the same thing cannot be said about the arts – especially film! Everyone thinks they know about the arts, especially film, and everyone has an opinion, so strong that most people outright dismiss what professionals have to say, so casually writing off everyone else’s opinions as mere matters of taste. Most people do not know a Spielberg from a Singleton. (Okay, they probably know Spielberg, but I’d bet the farm they’ve never heard of Singleton.) Everyone is critical, regardless of whether or not they’ve actually taken time to study the arts. And heaven forbid that any artist ever uses grant money to explore an issue that someone somewhere disagrees with. But even that pales in comparison to the reaction you’ll get if someone who hates the Hollywood machine, or for that matter the art houses, stumbles onto a film they actually like. Then it’s, "How come Hollywood doesn’t make more films like this?", or "It’ll probably be a flop," or "how dare you not agree this is a wonderful movie!"
I’d be punched out, or certainly belittled, if I dared to make these same arguments about a sports team or a sports figure.
But truly, this commentary is not about sports. And it’s not about film or the arts either. The only reason I’m talking about either is as a deliberately protracted lead-in to the real topic because of the deliberately cutesie headline, "Michigan Leads 11-11." The tied score should have been a clue that it’s not a score at all. No, this is not about sports, film, or the arts. Rather, this is my annual posting about the autumn leaves here in Michigan and how it came to be that in this November of 2011 (11-11), after 15 years of picking of leaves, I have finally discovered a much MUCH easier way to perform this very arduous, time consuming and back-breaking chore on this .9 acre lot of ours. I thought those of you who are also saddled with these chores might be interested. I have finally found a way to get ahead of these Michigan leaves, so I am sharing.
It has been suggested to me in past years that the easy way to do leaves is to simply mow over them. The blades will mulch them into the lawn and there is no need for a pick up at all. However, I have found this only works when the leaves are exceedingly light, otherwise they quickly clog up the tractor. So the only way this works is if you do leaves everyday, hardly a time or labor saver. I had considered buying a leaf collector for the Gravely tractor years ago but research revealed that with the size of our lawn I’d be emptying the collection bin every few minutes; so not really much of a time-saver. Besides, I think the collector was a thousand dollars, might have even been two, not really worth it.
With a lot of leaves on the lawn, you can’t really mow. You have to get them up first. So my modus operandi has always been to blow the leaves into 15 or 20 large piles across the lawn, then a little raking to build the piles and then pick up. It takes roughly about half an hour to blow the piles, another half an hour to rake them, and another two to three hours to pick them all up. A leaf blower doesn’t feel like much at first, but after you’ve been swinging one around for five or ten minutes, it starts becoming a real labor. A half hour of it is downright fatiguing. Likewise a few minutes of raking and bending doesn’t seem like much, but do it constantly for two or three hours and it’s pretty exhausting. Not to mention you’re sweating like crazy in all that cold air.
But that’s what my weekends had been like all these years - these three to four hour sessions once every week over the roughly seven week period during which the leaves come down every fall. (Plus another two hours on top of all that to mow!) In a typical season, I’d fill 150 of my 30 gallon barrels. Yard waste pickups used to be only every other week. When that was true, I could only put out a fraction of this yield before the snows came, so the leaves went around the house – all the way from the screen porch on the south side to the lavatory window on the north side, almost the entire house.
Several years ago, they went to once a week and, since then, I’ve been able to get the job done while only having to cover the south side, usually just a little bit on the east side. Last year, I saw a commercial for a new very powerful leaf blower that also did triple duty as a leaf vacuum and mulcher. It was a very impressive commercial, showing these big piles getting sucked up like a cyclone was hitting them. They made it look like a big pile of leaves could be sucked up literally in just a couple minutes, and mulch them into this canvas collector bag at the same time. There was the promise that it would literally turn eight barrels of normal leaves into 1 barrel of mulched leaves. An 8:1 ratio? That would be great. Now I would only have 20 barrels each season; that much I could easily put out on the curb. No more leaves around the house! And with only a few minutes on each pile, no more back-breaking labor. Instead of four hours/week, it would now be at most one hour per week. Much less labor, much less time, a big win-win.
Well, buyer beware! Didn’t exactly turn out that way. It was indeed a much better blower than the one I’d been using for so many years. It was also considerably heavier so swinging it back and forth for half an hour to make my 20 piles was now much more labor intensive than before. As for the labor and time-saving that was promised by the vac/mulcher, forget it. The vacuum wasn’t nearly as powerful as claimed. Ordinarily, it’d take about 15 minutes of raking and bending to pick up a large pile. That’s why it took about three hours to get up all the piles. After spending nearly an hour vacuuming and mulching my first large pile, I decided to go back to raking and bending. I disassembled the vacuum and used my new wonder tool just for blowing. The vacuuming was very labor-intensive too. As the collection bag became fuller and fuller, it became a real workout to keep the apparatus in the air and keep swinging across the pile. I might have stayed with it if only the 8:1 ratio had proven to be true. Not even close, more like 2:1. This wasn’t at all worth it. Fortunately, I’d only wasted $90 on this "better" blower/vac/mulcher.
This year I inaugurated an entirely new strategy that didn’t require any blowing at all. Though running the tractor over the lawn didn’t prove effective with the leaves, I found that running the trimmer over the lawn didn’t do a half bad job. In about twenty minutes, I could run the trimmer over the worst parts of the lawn and create several small piles that I could rake up in about five minutes. So in less than half an hour, I could get up the worst of it and keep them under control. I’ve done this a couple times a week. Then once a week on the day after a trim, mowing with the tractor got up the rest of it. And the piles this time were much fewer and much smaller. So this year when I put the usual 9 barrels out on the curb for Tuesday pickup, the 9 barrels were really the equivalent of what 30 barrels used to be.
So this year, for the first time, I actually got all the leaves out without leaving any around the house. And with much less time and almost no labor. Pushing the trimmer for 20 minutes requires almost no physical exertion, hardly enough to break a sweat. By the time I ran the tractor, I’d have maybe five or six small piles to pick up which would take about 15 minutes. So, with this new strategy, I have cut my leaf collecting time from four hours per week to three hours per week. But 2-1/2 of those 3 hours are spent either sitting on the tractor or pushing the trimmer, both easy labors. The actual bending and raking time is cut down to about 20-30 minutes. The labor intensity is cut from a 9 to 1.
I think I’m on to something here. For those of you who have struggled with this back-breaking chore as I have, I think I’ve discovered you don’t have to invest in an expensive collection attachment for your mower. This seems to work just as well and it doesn’t cost anything, not even a blower.
The first snow has now come (and already melted.) The last leaf pickup was last Tuesday so the 2011 leaf season is now officially over. Happy December!
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| Leaves 2010 |
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| vs Total leaves 2011 |
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