IT’S ROUNDUP TIME IN WEST WALNUT MANOR

It’s inevitable … Once fall arrives, all the leaves in the trees surrounding my back lawn decide that it’s time to loosen their grip on the branches they’ve been clinging to all summer and fall to the ground and litter up my lawn. Which means that I either have to rake all the leaves up or blow them all away with the handy-dandy leaf blower. Since each option requires a bit of physical effort, I try to put the chore off as long as I can.

Last week we had a great day of Indian Summer which the weather wizards said would be followed by a couple of days of rain. So I decided I had better get the leaves off the lawn before they got soggy. Bring on the blower!

It took three hours of lugging the heavy leaf blower around the yard attempting to combat a heavy breeze that was determined to blow the leaves back at me to finally round-up all the leaves and drive them to my compost piles at the back of the yard.

  Then I fetched my faithful summer lawn chair  to spend the rest of the warm sunny afternoon just relaxing. Notice that I really splurged on myself to get the perfect chair for summer reading and/or snoozing. Mlle. Renee claims that the chair  is the tool of the evil dragon that lives in the dead tree in the next yard and always tries to point out the dragon emblem on the chairs comfortable headrest. 

I really don’t have the heart to disillusion her by pointing out the emblem is really a lounge lizard and not a dragon. You have to keep the old dog on her toes, you know.

Any way I really didn’t spend the afternoon reading or snoozing.

I spent the afternoon watching the wind knock even more leaves out of the trees to re-litter the just blown lawn!

Fast forward to today!  The lawn is again covered with even more leaves than it was last week. So I decided not to repeat the leaf blowing fiasco. Instead I got out my handy-dandy Lawn Hog …   … attached the catcher bag that allows me to trim the grass and chop the leaves at the same time — and in just a little over an hour the back yard was a rolling expanse of green, grassy, leafless lawn!

At least until tomorrow!

THEY’RE BACK!

And none of these leaves are from trees that grow in my yard!