It's War

Ah! What lovely leaves we had last week. For several days the weather was warm and sunny, and the trees were showing off after a very favorable summer. But now, it's time to get out the rakes, blower, the tow-behind lawn sweeper, and the shredder and start fighting.



I post every year about "The War of the Leaves" like it's a new thing, but obviously it isn't. Every year between the third week in October and the third week in November the very tall,very abundant trees that ring our home dump their leaves. Usually after the most beautiful show of fall color - the one which gave our house it's name: Goldenwood.



After the Fall of the leaves, someone has to clean it up. We're not fastidious yard keepers, but we'd be buried in leaves year 'round if we didn't. Here's the statistics on this battle: by the end of the season Hannah and I will have gathered, and Harry will have shredded about a dozen piles, something like the ones on the picture. See the bag on the shredder? Harry will empty that some 5-7 times per pile. So he could easily shred and empty 60 bags. Each of those shredded bags represents about the amount of leaves you could pack solid into about 4 or 5, 33 gallon trash bags ( or at least 3 of those paper lawn and leaf bags city folk have to use.)So picture if you had to gather and bag maybe 250 to 300 garbage bags packed fill of leaves. Yeah, that's what we do. Before today, he had already shredded 28 bags. Today he will do about 20 more, and hopefully after one more shredding day later in the week, 80% of the leaves will be down, and we'll call it good.

The shredder compacts the leaves by crunching them into chunks about the size of a dime. They are then deposited 20 yards or so back in the woods, well away from the house where they are left to mulch themselves back to soil, and they are no longer fuel for a potential brush fire that could sweep through our yard.



Here's a lovely pix of a few of the enemy combatants.