I Hate Leaves!

When I purchased my home one of the last things the previous homeowner said to me before handing me the keys to my house was, "I left you a couple of rakes in the back. You're going to need them".

At the time this statement meant very little. What leaves? It wasn't until mid July that I started looking up at the massive trees, thick branches straining from the weight, and thought, "Every one of those leaves are going to be on the ground at some point".  I should have begun developing a strategy then, but for some reason I thought that if I didn't think about it that the problem would somehow go away.

Well about 3 weeks ago I noticed the first signs of trouble. It was a couple of leaves at first, then a few more, and within a week the lawn had a golden blanket of freshly fallen leaves. It was time to address the issue. Not knowing where to begin I called the City of Kingsburg.....

Clerk: City of Kingsburg
Darrin: I was wondering if the city had any sort of plan for excessive leaves.
Clerk: Well you should have a green waste can in the alley.....
Darrin: (Trying to suppress uncontrollable laughter) I think I might have more leaves than that.
Clerk: You could just bag them up in Hefty bags and then just put then in the can when you can fit them in....or...hold on let me ask somebody.

So I hear her in the background asking a fellow city employee and she informed her to tell me to just rake them out into the street and the city will occasionally come by and pick them up.

Darrin: Occasionally? Hmmm....what exactly constitutes "occasionally"?
Clerk: Well there's no set schedule

Now, imagining my leaf pile and wondering how cars will negotiate the street with my leaves in the way, I hung up. They want the leaves in the street. Then leaves they will get.....

So I grabbed my rake and it didn't take long to realize why all those gardeners carry leaf blowers. Not only was MY yard covered with leaves, but my leaves had also been blowing onto my neighbor’s yard and covering her lawn as well. Which brings up an important philosophical question......at what point is your leaf no longer your leaf? The moment it touches down in the neighbor’s yard, a week later, forever? If it blows down the block is it still your leaf? Can they trace them? But I digress.....

So out of guilt I raked MY yard and the neighbor’s yard. Of course my neighbor, rather than come out and thank me, decided to come out and let me know that the previous week her gardener had blown "MY" leaves off her yard and my yard. (I was sort of wondering where they went). It didn't take me as long as I thought and I soon had a nice Volkswagen-sized pile of leaves by the curb, patiently waiting for the next city employee on Leaf Duty.

Triumphant, I took a swig of my coffee, leaned against my rake, looked up at my yellow-leaved nemesis and had the most sobering thought of the morning...........only about 1% of the leaves have actually fallen off the tree. This is just an estimate of course, but even with a 2-3 percent margin for error I've still got a lot of leaves in my future. So....if anyone is sitting there thinking, "Hmmm....I'd better start shopping for Darrin's Christmas gift." (which I'm sure most of you are) I'm going to make your life easier.

Darrin's Christmas List:
Heavy Duty Industrial Grade 5HP Gas-powered Leaf Blower
A new rake
Stock in Hefty.

Reflecting on the Harvest: Rookie Gardening Tips

My first foray into gardening was a mix of successes and failures. I’ve always believed that that God had granted us “dominion” over the earth but most of the time my garden proved less than willing to easily succumb to my domination. I am pretty much at the end of the growing season and I have picked what I am currently considering the “final harvest” I say “currently” because it is California and any day now the temperature could rocket back up into the 80’s and within 48 hours I’ll have a fresh batch of mid-November veggies waiting for me when I get home.

However, I am going to assume that this is it.

My tomatoes stopped producing a while back which left me with peppers, a few more peppers, and still another round of peppers. This is what I picked last night which doesn’t account for the two bags I froze and the dozen peppers I roasted last night for dinner. I’m through with peppers!!!!!

Since this is my first garden I decided to help other rookie gardeners with a list of the things to expect from your first garden.

1. A gang of snails can and will completely decimate an entire garden of seedling plants almost overnight. Forget all the online organic crap they try to tell you will work to get rid of them. Go for the snail poison early and often.

2. If you start seeing veggies disappear overnight and you think something might be eating them, something probably IS eating them. I figured my neighbor was helping herself until I caught the real thief……

Possums appear to prefer zucchini, bell peppers, and squash. They tended to shy away from the jalapeno peppers and Anaheim chili’s. They must have been gringo possums.

3. Plant half as many zucchini plants as you thing you will consume. You’ll have so much zucchini that by the end of the season you’ll be making zucchini ice cream just to use up the damn things.

4. Ditch the organic dream while you still have your sanity. 100% organic is only for the jobless hippies that have nothing better to do than pick weeds and hand remove bugs off the leaves all day.

5. Don’t overwater your tomatoes. Just don’t.

6. Don’t plant and pick Habenero peppers unless you are certified in the safe handling of bio-hazardous chemicals. Just one of those buggers in a batch of salsa will eat through a plastic bowl. I don’t even want to know what it did to my stomach.

7. Your tomatoes probably aren’t going to be as pretty as the shiny red hot-house ones you buy in the store, but they will taste a thousand times better.

8. Use copious amounts of Miracle Grow.

9. Deny using Miracle Grow. You just have a green thumb right?

10. Enjoy your garden.

The garden didn’t turn out perfect, but it was fun and there was a certain sense of accomplishment in growing even the small about of food I was able to produce. Next year I may expand my garden but for now I am taking a well deserved winter break and giving my soil a little rest.