Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Rural Living Fun with wet leaves.

We've had almost non stop rain this entire month so I haven't been able to keep up with the leaf raking/blowing very well.
Well we got a little reprieve for a couple of days but there's more on the way so I decided to tackle the parking area out front today. It's about 75'x100' and had 4-6" of soaking wet Maple leaves and Pine Needles covering the whole thing. I ended up loading them in a wheel barrel with a pitch fork and hauling em out back and dumping them in the woods. Took me about four hours. My back is killing me.

Mother nature can be down right mean at times.

Probably would make good compost,but still chore to move em

Yea....it makes great compost but I can only use so much of it.

You and bristoe should form a support group!

Please don't compare me to Bristoe........ever.....

You need a skidsteer Charlie.

Problem with that idea is.....
1) Kind of an overkill for a 75'X75' area....don't ya think.
2) This is the first time in the 14yrs that I've lived here that we've had so much rain in Nov. that I couldn't simply blow/rake em up into a pile and burn em.
3) Probably scoop up as much gravel as leaves and they don't give those truck loads of gravel away.
4) There's no way to get the machine from the driveway to where I had to dump em.
5) Pretty expensive investment for something I "might" use for a couple of hours every 15years.
6) I wouldn't have anything to bitch about.

Number six.

We have pine needle here,and every year, each spring ,we take two 14' dump trailers to the slash pile filled to over flowing with side boards.They don't even make good compost

My mess is mostly Maple leaves which compost pretty well but I agree with you about the pine needles......I hate em.......The duff under pine trees does make good bedding for traps though but it takes years to break down.

We have Big Leaf Maples. Got a Stihl back back blower. Pretty sure my wife (110 lbs of her) cold use it to James Bond across town. It does a job on wet leafs.

This weekends project is to fab a extension to blow the leaves and fir needles from the second floor gutters.

I had a foot of leaves that had rained on and driven on for over a month. My Stihl blower just wasn't up to the task..

I do use my blower to clean my gutters two or three times a year though.

I do it from the roof.....no extension required as long as you ain't afraid of heights.and your roof isn't too steep to safely walk on.

Heights get to me. More so as I get older.

I worked 40 years as a carpenter....you get used to it.

I clean my gutters every fall with my power washer. But I like heights.

Five stories was as high I ever worked.

I did manage to fall 36' to the concrete while installing a glue lam roof system on an Albertsons store though.

I got up and walked away (I was in shock) but an electrition fell from a 10' scaffold and was paralized from the waist down on the same job....go figure...

I landed on my back and broke every rib on the right side of my body. It also ruptured a bunch of blood vessels in my lungs. I was spitting up blood for a month.

Maybe. But one of my best friends from high school is a paraplegic from falling while limbing up a tree. Didn't like heights before. That just made my visions of ending up in a pile that more realistic. I can figure out how to clean the gutters from the ground or I can pay someone.

Saying, "It's not the fall, it's the sudden stop", may sound funny, it's not. Just a mile from me, a worker fell onto concrete rebars. He was impaled, and died.