Leaves are Dwindling

 We had one more day of blowing Oak leaves this week, and that pretty much did it for the neighbor's trees.  Yesterday the London Plane lawn was thickly covered so we blew it without the neighbor's help because it was mainly our problem.  Having two people instead of three was a bit different.  We had a good west breeze which was hitting the garage corner and swirling back.  London Plane leaves are large and curly and they pick up air very easily.  That makes them much easier to move than Oak leaves, but also makes them more unruly. We decided early on that the best idea would be to blow them into a pile right there and then moved them with the tractor.

Blowing a short distance worked well from every direction.

There are some leaves still on the trees, but a manageable amount.  It has become apparent, that these fast growing trees, while beautiful, get bigger, taller and leafier every year.  I remember when the leaves could just be mulched with the mower.  Not anymore!

You might be surprised at what those look like on the ground.

We packed them into the loader as firmly as possible and made five trips to the wooded area on our east border where we have sort of a wild compost/fill area in a low, mucky spot where we dump rocks, gravel, soil and coarse or "diseased" plant material.  

We've created about 25 feet square of good ground here.  Below is the last area we did.

Now it's mowable instead of being rough and wet.

Operation Clean Sweep

 Leaf blowing ended up taking two and a half hours today and most of the time was spent dealing with the leaves from the London Plane Trees, the driveways, and the Oak leaves on the neighbor's lawn.  The Maple tree at the firepit was minimal.  My husband looked at the blog photos last night and told me that you really couldn't tell from the photos the extent of the problem.  This morning before we went out he was skeptical that we could actually move that many leaves and he was right.  The volume was worse than we have ever had to deal with all at one time. 

We have a pretty good routine down.  We have wire mesh on the split rail fences that gives us something to channel leaves against.  Sometimes we go three abreast creating a funnel.  Sometimes one has to go ahead lifting the leaves while someone else follows in their wake launching the leaves ahead. Sometimes we have to blow an area clear just to make room to fill it with the next wave.  Often we have to criss-cross, or create a long windrow (like baling hay)  and blow the pile against itself creating a stronger air current.  If the wind picks up we may have to change tactics and go the other way, blowing across the wind.

 Half of the leaves went down the Dry Creek Bed to the right of the fence and across the road to the ditch where the town can pick them up.  But everything to the left of the fence ended up in the driveway.  The intention was to blow them the length of the driveway out to the road.  But the pile was just too big and thick. 

  

 The near end is two feet deep and the length of the driveway is a foot deep.  They just don't want to move.  Then the wind started to pick up at the end of the driveway and blow them back across the lawn to the right so we changed tactics and blew them due west into the Oak trees.  Then we took a break to discuss what to do to keep them from dispersing back across the lawn.  The neighbor decided that we could blow them into the northwest corner where the wind won't pick them up and redistribute them and he can work on chopping them with the lawnmower to make them break down quicker.

So we turned left.

When we added all of the leaves under the trees to the ones that had been in the lawn, we were blowing a massive pile.  We finally got to the point where the leaf blowers were ineffective so the neighbor got his tractor and dozed them the rest of the way to the corner.  The pile is huge. 

We also blew clear the garden walks and across the River Bed and under the Maple tree.  The Maple leaves were much more manageable than the stiff Oak leaves.  We blew them past the pumpkin patch into the rough grass and the neighbor took a few minutes to mulch them into small pieces.

When we were done we decided it would be a nice day for a campfire.

50F (10C) sunny and breezy.

I think that was the fourth time we have blown leaves this year and we have two or three more rounds depending on how slowly or quickly the rest of the Oak and London Plane leaves drop. The weather has been so nice that we have not had any wind or rain to help get them down.  We have had years where we blew into December, and one or two years where the snow came before the leaves were cleared and we had to finish in March.

Blowing Leaves

 This time of year we blow leaves once a week.  At first it starts with our weekly mowing.  We blow leaves from the edges out into the grass, and the mowers mulch them up.  For the past two weeks, the grass has not really needed to be mowed.  But we still have leaves, so rather than put more wear and tear on the mowers and lawns, we switch to blowing the leaves off the lawns and driveway into the woods that border all sides of our properties. 

We are blowing leaves in the morning with the next door neighbor.  The main leaf problem comes from the oak trees in their front lawn.  If we don't help him deal with them, they will be over on our property.  Tuit Suite.  So we all have the big back pack leaf blowers.  We have a routine that covers both properties.  Just in case he gets out there ahead of me in the morning, I wanted to document the sort of leaves we are dealing with.  Many people might think in terms of one or more lawn trees.  Sort of like this apple tree.  This amount of leaves would be pretty simple to deal with.  But it's not actually like that.  

Nope.  It's not like that at all.  It's like this.

And this....

And their front lawn and driveway...

And our driveway....

And the dry creek bed....

A lot of the leaves fall at the feet of the oak trees.  

But if you don't deal with them, the north west wind will blow them over here...

So they have to be rounded up and either chopped with the lawn mower to make them less blowy, or loaded up with the tractor and taken to the back woods.

There are a lot fewer in my garden this year since we removed the border trees.

But the fire pit maple puts a lot in the river bed.

She's almost done.  Maybe tomorrow will be the last of it.

I did mention the leaves last year, but they were really just up against the fence that day and not scattered all over like today.  It can get a little overwhelming.  This will take us a little over an hour.  We won't try to get every last leaf, but we will get most of them.  You have to do a little at a time or they simply won't move.  Maybe I will remember to get a picture tomorrow when we are knee deep in leaf piles.  It's impressive.

The Chicken Coop

 Barbara in Florida asked about the building that appears in my frost photos.  Yes, this is a chicken coop, but it is also a garden shed.  This shed has had a long life.  My husband built it as tool storage when he built the house next door back in 1988.  I personally helped him move it twice, and when we had been dating a few years and I was living in an apartment, he turned it into a chicken coop for me.  When we married and he moved over here, the new neighbors wanted to put a larger shed in its place so they asked us if we wanted the chicken coop.  I said yes, without consulting, and it got moved once again.

The Coop up on blocks but in it's permanent location

Because we wanted it to stay a chicken coop, and because so much remodeling had been done to make it so, my husband added on to it to create our garden shed.  He stripped the siding off, and built a mirror image of the salt box style shed on the back side so that they became one building with two rooms adjoined by one wall.

Building the Garden Shed Blog

The roof lines can kind of mess with your head, but it was a perfect solution.

The original wide, equipment shed door on the chicken coop was replaced with an insulated door.  The lumber from the doors was planed down and repurposed into my cold frame.   The shed was vinyl sided to match the farmhouse, and a deck was built.

Finished Garden Shed Blog

The chicken coop portion has been left untouched.  The feeders and waterers are still hanging. There is a wire wall closing off the right third of the shed with the low ceiling.  The walls and ceiling were insulated and covered in ship-lap and there are lights on a timer.  South facing windows provide daylight and sheltered fresh air all year 'round. There is a rubber stall mat on the floor and plenty of roosts.  The space is about 4'x8' which is more than comfortable for six to eight birds.

Current photo

Here is another photo from before the walls were insulated.

The rest of the shed is insulated and shingled.  There is plenty of room here for bales of straw or pine shavings and bins for feed and grit as well as whatever tools you need to care for chickens.  In bad weather, you could latch open the door to the "birdcage" and increase the square footage.  Because this shed is mouse proof, and hasn't been occupied by chickens in many years, it has become storage for things that need to be kept out of the reach of mice and chipmunks like patio umbrellas, canvas tarps and grass seed. The 24'x24' chicken run fence is completely built but we never installed the wire fencing.  The wire is still stored in a roll in another shed, as well as enough bird netting to secure the top from hawks and if we ever decided to get chickens, we could be fully operational in a matter of hours.  We would just need to find a new home for the patio umbrellas and install the wire.

I patched three photos together to give a panoramic view.

The door to the run has a cute little chicken porch.  The door can be pushed closed and secured with a rod from outside the gate.  The railing was a very popular perch.

The chicken run has been covered with road stabilization mat and coarse sand to make it easy to maintain.  I have to go in there and pull weeds two or three times a year but it is easy and sort of satisfying.  I found that this $3 junk auction cultivator works pretty slick to uproot weeds.

So that is the chicken coop.  It is a pretty nice chicken coop to be sitting empty, but we have managed to keep it mostly clutter free and ready to go.  Chickens are certainly an appropriate compliment to a home garden because they gobble up insects and consume excess produce and weeds turning them into valuable fertilizer.  They also make very entertaining pets.  Maybe someday.

Storing Dahlias

 I got all of my Dahlia tubers stored.  I worked on them yesterday and today.  I'm whooped.  That is a lot of hard work.  I've done more detailed blogs about my methods in the past.  Digging and Storing Dahlias  and Dividing Dahlias.   This year I made some improvements to my system that saved a lot of work.  Instead of washing them into the wheelbarrow and then dumping the mud out each time, I set my compost sifter up on sawhorses so the mud washes away.

I also got these neat tags that can stay with the tuber all year.  You can wash them and plant them.  I no longer have to write on the tubers.  When you plant them you can either leave them on the tuber or pull them off and put them on the garden stake for identification.

Those two improvements made a huge difference.   Also, I have culled over two dozen plants this year.  Some of them I pulled during the summer when I lost patience with them and some I pulled recently because I didn't want to waste time and energy storing them.  This was either because they just don't bloom well, or they were not a color that I liked.  A couple of them died on their own.  

I cleaned up each clump, removing damaged or old tubers, and a few of them divided up on their own.  Some of the clumps are massive.  This poses a storage problem but it ensures that the plant will be large and productive next year.  I've stopped worrying as much about dividing them.  I just remove what I need to and get them cleaned up. I managed to get everything into the same amount of tubs as I did last year, even though many of the clumps were quite large. 

This is most of the ones from yesterday drying in the breeze.

I have decided that I enjoy getting new varieties each year, looking forward to seeing the new bloom in person.  I will probably keep storing Dahlias for a few more years, but the more I store, the fewer new ones I can plant so I am not going overboard.  Last winter I stored 97 tubers.  I did not have room to plant them all this spring, and between that culling and culling throughout the year, I am down to 59 in storage.  And that is plenty!

Frost and Fire 2026

 This morning we had a hard freeze.  29F  And the Dahlias and Zinnias are showing it.  Which is good.  Dahlia cutting and digging may commence.  I am ready for it.  This coming week will be beautiful weather, perfect for dealing with this chore.

The Dahlia flowers are burned so all of the bees are wandering around looking for food and being annoying.

I have been leaving my ornamental peppers out.  One of them is succumbing to the frosts we have had.

There are two that I am considering overwintering.  I moved them against the wall of the house and they have not yet been touched by frost.

It is amazing how the routine of our lives repeats itself year after year.  It is time for the autumn brush fire.  Two years ago we burned on this weekend as well.   Every year we tell ourselves that surely this is the last year we will have enough volume of brush and tree limbs to require burning.   Then the saplings start growing in the brushy areas, and lawn trees need limbing up, or something falls in the lawn.  The next thing we know, we have accumulated a whole lot of brush and the pile begins to grow.

This pile had been growing since July.  It has chunks of punky Ash that was not suitable for firewood, the neighbor's Linden limbs that were lying on the roof, our spruce branches.  We took some time cutting brush and goldenrods away from the wild edges, and then set fire to everything.  It went up in an inferno.  Once the July pile had gotten so big it was going to topple, we began piling brush in other areas so the neighbor could use the forks on his loader to add it to the pile once it began to burn down.  There were a lot of dry leaves in the pile and we had to rake them up out of the lawn.  My husband had mowed around the pile this morning to clear any dead grass or leaves away.

We had almost an inch of rain this past week, but we prefer to burn on a day when the rain is just clearing out so that everything is still wet.  We had large fire extinguishers from the garage on hand, but just to be on the safe side my husband filled the tractor loader full of water and we used watering cans to water down the grass around the fire.  

The grass was drying fast and we didn't want to have to worry about it.

Our high today was 61F (16C) which was vey pleasant weather for sitting around a huge fire.  Winter will be here soon.  I saw this prediction on Facebook this week which says that our winter here in NY should be mild.  That would be fine with me.  The past two winters we have had significant snows which left us shoveling the roofs to be on the safe side.

NOAA released their winter outlook today, highlighted by an exceptionally strong El Nino. The end result favors a general pattern that will likely leave snow-lovers across the Great Lakes & New England disappointed. There is a strong lean toward a relatively warm winter, which theoretically throttles the ability for lake effect snow to contribute.

The View Out My Window - Gloomy Day Edition

 The thing about fall color is that it even looks good on a gloomy day.  We have a rainy day and our warm 68F (20C) temperature right now is our high for today.  It is a good day to stay inside and look out the window.

Talk about saturated color.

That's probably as pretty as it is going to get today.  Wind and rain will bring down the leaves and we will be right back to garden cleanup.  We are hoping to get our summer brush pile burned this weekend.  It is a lot more pleasant burning brush on a cold day than it is in the heat of summer.

Two years ago we had a brilliant autumn, but I think this year is even better.