Are you still raking leaves?

Here in New England, fall is the prettiest season of all.

The only problem is all of those pretty leaves fall on my lawn.
Wouldn’t it be great if the leaves changed colors but stayed on the tree? Then turned green again next spring.
No one asked me, so I guess we have to deal with the falling leaves.

I do most all of the maintenance around my house. I’m one of those “handy guys” you see at Home Depot all the time.
I really don’t mind the repair work, a habit born out of necessity. I can’t afford to have anyone else do this stuff.

However, besides painting, the one job I really don’t like is raking leaves. It takes forever to get this done. Throw in the aggravation of trying to get my three boys to help me, and I’d be happy if the leaves never changed color. Though, I really can’t blame my sons, I hate this task myself.

First I bought one of those lawn sweepers. You push it around your yard and brushes are supposed to sweep the leaves into a tray. This thing worked at first, but it ended up having too many drawbacks, The chute was too small and the filled up real fast. You have to empty the chute constantly making an already long job longer. Uneven ground height creates more issues where the brushes don’t make contact.

Next up, electric blower.
I bought an electric blower. This worked fairly well. It had drawbacks, but I used it for years. Finally, I got tired of dragging extension cords all over the place. Besides, the arm fatigue I suffered was very painful. Hours and hours of blowing leaves was really tough on my arm.
However, I did like the concept.

Speed ahead to 2006. I had read about back pack blowers, and thought I’d like to try one. They are expensive, but my intense dislike of raking was getting worse, and my arm was in pain from the electric blower, so I decided to break down and buy one.

Even though the speed ratings of the electric and gas backpack blowers are fairly even, I found the backpack blower to be far more efficient. Add to that, no extension cords and the ergonomic comfort of having the unit on my back with the controls at my fingertips was great.
Suiting up: Strap this baby on your back, put on the safety glasses and headphones, and you look like something out of the Jetsons or Star Trek.

In fact, I was actually enjoying blowing leaves. So much so, that I found myself blowing the leaves off the road, and even in front of my neighbors house. Blowing out shrub beds that have bark mulch or other materials was a breeze (excuse the pun) because of the speed controls.

See the before and after pixs:

After:

Before:

After:

Compare:

The after shot was “after” about 10 minutes. A job that used to take me hours and hours of raking, week after week, has been reduced to about two hours for each session. On top of that, my arm no longer aches after a session. Sure, I live on a couple of acres in the forest, so I get to blow my leaves right into the woods. If you can’t do that, blowing them into a pile for bagging and disposal is easy.

These units are not cheap. The one I bought (Echo) ran about $250, but I haunted Home Depot until they were offering a sign up discount. I signed up for a HD credit card, got 10% off anything I bought that day, plus a $50 credit. So I knocked $75 off the price, paid the balance on the first bill and closed the account. You’ll also want a pair of safely glasses and some sound proof headphones or ear plugs.

Bottom line: If you hate to rake, you absolutely want one of these:

Anyone want to buy a leaf sweeper and an electric blower?