Daylight Savings is over and we are on the edge of winter. Friday we had serious northwest winds pounding on us all day. Leaves were everywhere and the Oak trees that still had a lot of leaves on them were whirling around like crazy. Yesterday morning we had arranged with the neighbor to blow leaves. Not counting the many times we rounded leaves up with the lawnmower and stashed them in a tube of wire fencing for mulch next year, this was the third time we had "blown leaves". This entails getting out our big back pack blowers and working with the neighbor to clear our side lawn and his front lawn.
There is a reason why we have woven wire along the split rail fence along the property line. It gives us a place to corral leaves.
We gave the neighbor an hour head start. He blew everything on his side of the fence across the drive to his lawn and then we all went up the dry creek bed clearing the remainder out of the rocks and from under the Spruce trees. Then we helped him get an inconceivable amount of leaves across his front lawn over to the side lawn where he ended up scooping them up with the tractor loader and taking six big loads into the back woods. We were far from precise on our leaf removal. We left many behind, but in situations such as these, you have to work at it incrementally. You don't count the leaves you left behind... you count the ones you moved.
In many areas we can just blow everything back into the brush.
There are several places that leaves drift.
We just help them down the drive to a more appropriate location.
We will still have to blow one more time before the end of the year. After that we wait until April when we are mowing the lawn again to blow leaves out of corners and hand pick them out of tight spaces in the landscape beds.
We had been planning to burn to brush pile today, but in the wind storm, this dead Ash tree snapped. We need to decide of we are going to try to cut it and process the top into the fire, or leave it.
The base is still way too sturdy to just push over with the tractor. We tried that. We will have to cut it or pull it like we did the last two trees that broke back here. Well, like we took down two of the last three... There is just no end to the dead Ash trees here.
