Anticipating wind this weekend

A week or so ago I unboxed a new garden tool from Stihl, which I'm fully expecting to help us tame the leaves in our garden.  You can see from the first photo in my conservatory plans post just how many trees we have in our garden (just) and how they're all pretty much bare right now. As you know all those leaves have to go somewhere and I can tell you it's not up, it's most definitely down and along some. We've leaves covering the flower beds, in the slate (much to MOH's disdain) and quite a few have sought solace together in random sheltered spots around the garden. You know the places that you'll twist and turn to get into and then struggle to turn and twist to get out of without dropping the clutch of leaves you've gathered. 

Yes exactly.  Collecting leaves by hand is often a futile task, and one that kills your back, even more than digging I think. 

But leaves are good. Well rotted down leaves are good, so in a year or two's time, the leaves that are creating quiet chaos in our garden will be the stars of the show, providing valuable leaf mould. We've a leaf mould compost bin over on the allotment as well as a smaller bin in our garden, as we gather sack fulls of leaves. And as we'll use most of the leaf mould on the plot, it made sense to "make" leaf mould there, of course the challenge is to get the sacks of leaves over there in the first place, but that's a small logistics matter...

Did you know that the simple black sack is your friend when it comes to leaf mould?  

Making leaf mould is one of the few things I use black sacks for, and I buy the cheapest ones I can get hold of. Before I fill it with leaves I take great joy in laying the sacks out on the grass and stabbing them with my garden fork. The leaves need some air, and I tell MOH that it's good for his grass too...

If your leaves are wet then simply fill your sacks and tie the top and leave in a quiet corner of your garden until you find them about the same time next year, when you can give them a look and see how they're doing. Depending on what kind of leaves you have, they may take longer to do their thing, but it won't be long before you've got some fabulous homemade goodness to use in your garden.

But back to my new garden tool

You'll know I'm an advocate of STIHL, the company and its products and am already the proud owner of a compact grass trimmer which now I regularly "wrestle" MOH for. It's his favourite too, but don't worry I do pull rank and claim it back as my own, most of the time... Sometimes it's just as well to let him get on with it, while he's happy.

The new tool I've unboxed is a compact cordless blower, hence the prediction for more wind to come at the weekend.  Once again it features a 36V Lithium-ion battery and Stihl's quiet technology, which they say on their website means you don't need to wear ear protection. Remembering my visit to their Competence Centre in Kufstein and the work and testing they undertake on their products, I'm looking forward to hearing - or rather not hearing - what they've achieved with this model.

Like the grass trimmer before it, this is easy to manage and designed to be easy to use.  There's a couple of other features which I'll be testing out at the weekend, these include the length-adjustable blower tube which can be adjusted for whoever's using it to ensure that the blowing force (now get me) remains at the optimum level to make short work of those leaves and twigs.

The blurb says that everything you need to operate the blower control functions and the safety locking lever are incorporated easily into the handle, which has been designed so it's easy to use for both right or left-handers. I'm sure that for many lefties, that's music to their ears. 

So let's hope the weather is as nice as it was last weekend (sadly I don't think I'm going to be that lucky), or at least let's hope the only wind around is the self-made sort courtesy of my new leaf blower! I'll let you know how I get on, but in the meantime if you want the technical details they're readily available on the Stihl site.

* This is a collaborative post, but all views are my own.

Leaves. And wellies. And a quick look at the garden.

Sunday was a lovely day here, so with chores to do I put on my gardening fleece and my wellies and headed out to water the greenhouse and scrub the food recycling bins. Oh the glamour!  I'll share more from the greenhouse another day, but don't worry I'll spare you the rest. 

I was all for heading back inside to do some baking, but MOH was intent on some leaf collection, and I was soon roped in to help. We had our three sycamore trees pollarded a couple of weeks ago, sadly though that was just after the really windy spell. And in that really windy spell all the leaves that weren't down already, came down. So there were quite a few to collect. 

YEAP -  NO LEAVES THERE!

BUT PLENTY HERE

Most of the leaves had collected in the troughs we spent some time digging in the summer in anticipation for the edging installation. And I'm still not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing. We haven't made as much progress as we'd like with the edging, but as long as the weather stays dry and the ground stays wet, we should be able to continue, and hopefully make progress by Spring.

AND MORE HERE TOO

But first to pick up these leaves. It's hard work, harder than you think. My tools of choice are gloves, a trowel and black sacks. MOH favours the rake. Black sacks are ideal though, so even if you don't have a leaf compost bin, as long as you aerate - or make holes in - the black sack, your leaves will break down in the bags. 

The fact that our leaves were wet is also good for composting, just not so good for picking up. We filled fifteen bags of leaves and the fun bit - well after all that bending down it's fun - is stabbing the bags with a trowel or a fork to let the air in. Our black sacks of leaves are destined for the allotment, as one of the pallet compost bins is dedicated to leaf mulch. 

A quick tour of the rest of the garden

Now picking up leaves aren't usually my thing, I'd much rather potter about a bit. So as I made my way around the garden I decided to take a snap or two to break up the monotony. So it was good to see the pyracantha berries still out. They're in a relatively shady spot against the fence, but bring a burst of colour as you walk past. Or if you're stuck there for a while shovelling leaves into a black sack.

At the back of the garden I took a little break to check the little christmas tree from last year.  It's done well, where it is after a bit of a worrying time in all that hot weather earlier in the year, but I'm not sure I'll be trimming it this year to make a wreath.  Partly, because I think it'll benefit from a bit more growing time, and also because I'm not sure I'll have enough time to actually make one this year, but we'll see how it goes.

I managed to get one of the best pictures of my dogwoods for a while, the sun was just right and you can see it on the jasmine.  It's hard to imagine them as bare rooted plants back in 2013 now, that trellis is six foot tall, so it looks like I'll have some lovely stems to cut next year.

On the patio the agapanthus seemed to be coping well with the weather, I hope they don't mind it a bit chillier. Last year was so mild they really didn't have much to contend with.  I've a plan to cover them with horticultural fleece if we have a prolonged cold spell.

Under one of the sycamores the euphorbias were back in force, and covered with leaves - but those are for another day, and look the hosta is trying to flower too.

By now I've headed to the back of the garden again and am clearing the leaves by the stone circle, where the pear tree is. It fruits, but they are rock hard and never seem to ripen. This year we noticed more fruits than normal - possibly because we gave the tree a good prune - but the squirrels seemed to get to most of them before we did.  I don't think the fruits were any better, or tastier this year than before as we've found so many of them discarded at the base of the tree. 

I found another one on Sunday and was amazed and intrigued by how it had fared. It was rock hard, but gently decomposing. And now it's in the compost instead of just on the garden, fascinating isn't it?

And that's pretty much a tour of the garden, I was out of photos to take and still bored of collecting leaves, so I hatched a new plan to escape. This time I headed inside to make lunch, using the second cauliflower that we'd picked on the allotment the day before to make a cheesy cauliflower soup (if you're interested I included a very high-level recipe in the turnips post yesterday), and that seemed to do the trick.

I left MOH to sort out his various piles of leaves, but couldn't help but notice how much better the garden looked for picking them all up.  

That just leaves (no pun intended) taking the multitude of sacks to the allotment and picking up the leaves that are in the beds, but I read somewhere that it doesn't pay to be too tidy in the garden, as the wildlife appreciate some disorder. So that's definitely my plan, what about you?