Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

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Rake your leaves but bag them. Leaving them in the gutter just plugs up the drains!

The great leaf-raking debate rages in our neighbourhood.

There’s almost a competition among the neighbours to rake your leaves faster and cleaner than the others. After seeing the neighbour’s new leafblower/mulcher, I bit the bullet and bought one. Having all the garden mulch from the dead leaves seemed like a good idea at the time.

The problem is that it’s simply too rainy here in Vancouver. The leafblower/mulcher can’t handle the wet leaves. It just coughs and grinds away trying to whip those leaves into tiny particles. Alas, it keeps getting jammed with wet leaves. I stop the machine, stick my hand up the nozzle and pluck out the wet mass. Needless to say, the new tool is sitting in the garden shed now, unused.

For me, raking leaves is almost zen-like. The sharp scraping sound of the rake tines against the pavement is the only irritating part of raking leaves for me.

But back to the debate. Can you use clear bags or do you have to use the brown kraft paper bags? Such a dilemma but when the city finally picks up the bags of leaves, I guess we’ll see who wins out.

And by the way, it’s not cool to just rake all your leaves into the gutter. The city used to send around crews and machines to clean out the leaves in the gutter but that practice ended years ago.

So Mr. Know-It-All down the street, don’t keep piling your leaves in the gutter. If my toilet backs up because the gutter drains are plugged because of you, don’t be surprised when I, and most of the other neighbours, come knocking at your door.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 8:06:46 PM and is filed under JOURNAL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.