So with the fair weather arriving, my desire to clean up the yard was aroused. We own less than a quarter acre, but everyone around us has big trees. I love them until November when something needs to be done with leaves. The good news is that our town provides a service where during the fall, persons driving a Snuffleupagus come by and snuff up any leaves you’ve raked to the street. It’s a wonderful, cleansing feeling when the Sunffa comes by. It’s a joyous time of the year where folks are dancing in the streets, setting off fireworks and partaking in general merriment. Think of the movie, The Ten Commandments when Moses climbs Mt. Sinai and finds out the hard way that leaving his brother Aaron in charge was not the best idea.
But it’s not all fun and games. The leaves have to somehow get to the street. And they don’t fly there by themselves. For more than a quarter century I’ve used the electric leave blower my grandfather left me. That’s electric, as in you need a very long power cord. It’s a royal pain in the rump to use. And the wind it blows is comparable to a what you feel when you sit across from a five year old as he blows out his birthday candles. Long story short, by the time the Snuffa party starts, I’m usually in traction.
This spring, I cracked open the wallet, released the moths, and made two strategic purchases. First, I purchased an electric leaf mulcher. For decades, I’d been craving one, but always thought it was a frivolous purchase. I have two arms, two legs and a back…what’s the problem? Never the less, I did my homework and found the two highest rated leaf mulchers. Even better, I found a YouTube video of what appeared to be a reasonable person doing a comprehensive bake off of these two products. The highest rated one was the winner.
Couple of interesting comments made: The guy doing the testing was most impressed with the two plastic leaf collection mitts that made picking up the leaves easier. He also made the point that the leaf mulching is done by what is in essence, a two-side plastic string weed whacker. There was no gargantuan set of metal teeth grinding things up into microscopic specks. (I was hoping for the metal teeth.) But considering how easily I can injure myself, this was a godsend. He also said that if you’re wearing a pair of work gloves, you really can’t get hurt if you stick your hand deep into the leaf collection funnel. A couple of thoughts came to mind. First, I’ve had an abnormal fear of weed whackers ever since I was doing some whacking in flipflops. I got lazy, wasn’t paying attention, and let’s just say things went sideways. Second, why would you need to stick your hand deep into the leaf collection funnel? I got an idea when I watched a quick snippet of another video where the tester said, “You get better results if you mulch the same bundle of leaves twice.”
Undeterred, my spouse went on Amazon and in one day we were the proud owners of the top-rated portable leaf mulcher on the market today. The leaf mulcher delivery truck had to be circling the neighborhood. My next purchase I made locally. It was an EGO leaf blower. Pretty smart right, buying a leaf blower in spring when they’re on sale. Well, they had the last laugh. When I got home the box only had the heavy batter in it – no blower. With that situation remedied, I now possessed all the tools necessary to take on the natural world.
After some minor functional testing, I had a big leaf massacre planned. You see I was deficient with regards to my fall 2025 leaf collection. And I missed the last Snuffleupagus pick up. So I decided to just put my leaves in the deepest part of my property. I was thinking it would just look natural. I was wrong. It looked like someone was trying to make an igloo out of leaves, but then a hurricane hit. I was in the thick of this project when I needed to use my new superior leave blower to get the heinous leaves out of tough spots and prepare them to be fed into the mulching machine. I turned the leaf blower on, and about seven seconds later, the battery was dead. I guess my testing was more extensive than I thought.
Luckily, a week before I had recharged the battery to my weedwhacker, which was also an EGO. And it had the same size battery. Finally, I caught a break. Not so fast, just like a new iPhone where you can’t use your existing charger cable on new technology, they made a slight change to the new battery connect mechanism and they don’t work together. I’m back to the rake and crawling around on my hands and knees pulling out painfully embedded leaves. But I still had my top-rated leaf mulcher to save the day. This is what I learned: the mulcher doesn’t work well with wet leaves. It also can’t deal with the tiniest of twigs. And very quickly, the mulched leaves bunch up around the deep insides of the circular mulching funnel…painfully close to the whacking mechanism. I will say this, wearing thick winter work gloves with lots of cushion was not a problem. Not that I’d want to do it a lot. But if you wear thin, leather work gloves, plan on getting the feeling back into your fingers within a couple of hours.
So, after my magnificent triumph over the leaf menace, I came back inside, a sweaty mess. I asked my wife what she thought of my handy work (I still couldn’t hold a glass of water). She looked up at me and said, “You know, you’re spending more time out there now, then you ever did.”
