Oh my how I wish they would just vanish. I feel like I have been picking them up forever. I guess we're in that phase of doing lawns AND leaves at the same time which ramps up the pressure a bit when on site. Here are my tips for making things a bit easier:
1. Blower. Backpack blowers make it so much easier to clean out little corners and borders. Blow leaves onto grass or a smooth hard surface where they can be easily collected.
2. A chelwood 32p lawn rake or similar has a nice wide sweep that does a very thorough job of collecting all the gunk off the lawn.
3. Bulk bags are good for sweeping the piles of leaves into. Use the 'prop bag open with legs and sweep between your legs' method to get the bag half full so it sort of stays open when you right it.
4. Try to schedule leaf clearance on a dry day when the previous day was also dry. It takes so much longer to blow leaves from the ground when they are pritt-sticked down.
5. Look up! If there are still leaves on the trees then DON'T SPEND EXTRA TIME GETTING EVERY LAST LEAF! As soon as you leave site and a gust of wind blows your perfect job will be wasted. Do the thorough final clearup after the last of the fall.
6. Once the last of it has been cleared I like to do a lawn edge, final border cultivation and weed, make sure the lawn is cut really short and really smarten things up for the winter in preparation for the following spring.
Has anyone got any other ideas?
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DRY DAY?
What's one of them, two in a row unheard of!
Don't forget the wind as well, LOL
You dreaming again, Dan?
Create a "goal net" using a couple of fencing pins and green horti netting.
Blow leaves into netting, roll up and place in van ;-)
I once ran a site whos client rep was a Lt Col Retired. He would complain bitterly about leaves being left on the ground at the end of the day from September till the clear up in January no matter how long the lads spent trying to round them up. My engineering coleagues used to keep asking why didn't we use a stronger glue to keep the biggers on the the trees.
When I rewrote the spec I changed the leaf clearing from the "whole of the site shall be cleared of leaves in the months of September to December" to one that said "leaf clearing shall be completed around the whole site on x occasions per month." A performance based leaf clearing spec is nonsensical IMHO.
Goal net seems like a nice idea, I may try that.
I'm looking at buying a blower, do you have any recommendations? I saw Axminster have one for half the price as a Stihl blower but then every Stihl I have, works every time and that's why I'd pay double for one but a friend gave me a BR400 which doesnt work. Shame. So any recommendations? Or just stick with a rake? lol
Good advice Dan, agree completely about your tidy up method in point 6. That way it stays looking good till spring
got a job at the minute, Huge lawn with 4 over mature limes and an over mature oak, they insist on it being done every week. takes 2 and a half hours to clear the lawn with a stihl BG85 a lawn rake, a bulk bag and a ride on mower to drag the bags up to a wood to dump them.
starting to annoy me now, and there's still loads left on the trees!!
The BG85 will be slow as well. The beauty of a big backpack is the sheer volume of leaves it can move and from quite a distance, so you can be clearing leaves 20-25ft in front of you rather than 6.
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