A ton of noise to move a very small mass of clippings, etc, creating a cloud for 30 minutes to do a less complete job, often just blowing it all into the street without concentrating it and picking it up. Maddening.
But leaf blowers are unique in that they're not only obnoxious and wasteful, but also stupid to begin with. You’re spending money and time and effort and polluting both the environment AND mental environment to avoid raking, just so the wind can undo your efforts??
Leaf blowers make me profoundly misanthropic.
Even more, it isn't like rakes don't have a horrible sound of their own, as soon as you get a single paved section involved.
With a rake or broom you can remove the leafs/dust, a blower mostly just makes it someone else's problem.
That said, I definitely have a push broom I use to finish off the sidewalk. Have to first rake, though, as i am moving a lot of leaves over it.
Please define your terms. I have seen the people wielding these monstrosties piss around for hours chasing one or two leaves or meaninglessly form pile of leaves that have no function other than to appear large so that the other inefficient human can stop only once to load them onto their gasoline chariot.
Most of this work could easily be either: 1) solved by refusing the scorched earth, anal standard of lawn care ; 2) good old fashioned, quiet wheel barrows and rakes operated by people paid a fair wage for manual labor instead of externalizing costs onto the rest of us.
Used even remotely competently, a blower beats a rake. Hands down.
Now, there is a solid argument that for small yards, a rake and broom are fine. And indeed, that is what I use when doing my yard. With a large yard, though, blower with bagging lawn mower could accomplish in one day and ten bags what would take three days and forty bags. Easy.
I can't hear your rake through my headphones two blocks and three stories up.
I wonder if the planet will be habitable in 1000 years time by 'traditional' humans. We may need to transcode ourselves into computers, or at least get pretty damn bionic.
If you think a leaf-blower is irritating you have never heard one of these f*s.
One of my neighbors used a leaf blower just hours before the expected arrival of a hurricane.
Explain that one.
I had a neighbor who would swat flies outside.. There's a lot of crazy idiots around. I am no longer surprised by their disturbing frequency of appearance.
Trust me it's not fun.
Now personally myself. I think it's stupid to remove leaves from a site rather than let them decay naturally and add their nutrients back into the soil. But when you're being paid to do something and you need to make money to keep living in a house. That leaf blower is really handy.
Also, I try to give the benefit of the doubt to the people outside doing this every week, but I'm extremely annoyed. I don't really have a choice; I rent and everywhere one can rent, one has to be a part of this madness. I wouldn't by choice pay someone to do this.
In fact I just spent six hours today doing that... with a rake. We had a window where the snow cover lifted just long enough. It'll rain tomorrow, then freeze and snow again later next week.
How long have people been 'treating and removing' them? Presumably the leaves were tolerable while on the tree, yet poisonous. It doesn't seem to stop people planting them. (A lot of questions, but there are a lot of experts on here!)
Black Walnut: The Killer Tree https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/2005/jul/070701.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juglone
"Juglone is occasionally used as a herbicide. Traditionally, ...has been used as a natural dye for clothing and fabrics...and as ink. ...has also found use as a coloring agent for foods and...hair dyes. ...is currently being studied for its anticancer properties"
We had to rake the leaves, because, if they were allowed to decay on the ground, it would kill most the other plants.
There was a leaf blower, but we didn't use it for long - personally, I thought the rakes got the job done more quickly and thoroughly, even with that obnoxiously large yard. But then, I suppose I wasn't doing it professionally. Maybe with practice I'd have gotten better at it. The leaf blower was new; rakes are something I grew up with.
It was certainly more work to use a rake. I see that as an upside, though - it's always struck me as odd that people will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make it so everyday tasks require minimal physical effort, and then spend even more money on home fitness equipment and gym memberships in order to artificially replace all the physical activity they were ostensibly trying to avoid in the first place. Again, though, that's personal use, not professional.
A few days ago as I was doing some basic yard work when a friend stopped by and suggested I hire someone to do it instead. I told him exactly that, “If I pay someone to do this, I’ve got to pay for a gym memebership too.”
It’s also a nice change of pace to do something that not only doesn’t involve a computer, it doesn’t have any moving parts or machines at all. Very relaxing.
Just look at Olympic weightlifters - they tend to look plump but they certainly are well strong as Olympic weightlifters.
Did you mean powerlifters?
There must be a name for this strange human condition. I marvel at people who spend ridiculius sums of money to get the latest, lightest carbon fiber paddle for their stand up paddle board.
a) you're trying to get exercise,a heavier paddle will give you more
b) if your goal is to go faster then almost anything will do it - try a kayak
The same reasoning for accessorizing cars to look like UFO.
People have very strange ideas about landscaping, and that usually means bad things for the environment. eg: "I'm a fully functioning adult, but I couldn't bear to see two kinds of grass so I had to cover the whole lawn with a neurotoxin."
You would get more hours raking and thus more income if you were not using leaf blowers: you are externalizing costs to the detriment of both your own income and the rest of us.
Without a blower you're down on your knees lifting them with your fingers.
Been there, done that.
It's odd to see suburbanites raging against blower noise whilst just shrugging at traffic noise as 'necessary'. At least blowers don't operate between midnight and 05:00...
My keaat favourite part of landscaping was never the work or dealing with lousy people, it was the fact that people were paying so much money to have what was not only pointless work done much of the time but work that was actually detrimental to them having nice productive gardens and greenspaces that didn't require chemicals and constant work.
My background is in ecology and ecosystems management and restoration do s lot of the work i did as a landscapre really was at odds with a lot of the things I was trained to do professionally and a lot of the things I belief in morally.
I have to admit not all the work I did was like that, I spent a bit of time working for a company that specialized in making natural gardens, we didn't use power tools or spend much time rakinf and tidying, and honestly the work was far more rewarding, but I do really appreciate the need to use powertools and do these unpleasant things if that's what customers want.
It sucks. The traditional English garden or the idea of a proper landscaped exterior is really a terrible idea in a lot of says. I've never really liked the way a perfectly pruned and immaculate yard looks, even if i'm fairly good at making it look that way.
Working landscaping though is kind of like a lot of service work. You provide a service a lot of people want, you get treated like, shit for doing it and in the end the work you do is at best pointless at worse actively detrimental in a lot of ways.
The problem, like with a lot of thibgs, is people have this made up ideal of how their things and life should be, and they're willing to spend lots of money to make sure it's exactly how they want. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but the ideals of what people think is the 'thing to have' is definitely skewed towards a lot of pointless, expensive, polluting work that really doesn't need to be paid for.or done on such a scale as it is.
I'd love to work outside with my hands all day but not with those horribly loud power tools. They seem like fighting against nature somehow.
I bike to work. During the local dry season (roughly April to November) I need to keep an ear out for leaf blowers on the way to work and adjust my route accordingly. Otherwise riding through one of their dust clouds is like dredging a chicken breast through flour.
Maybe there's hope for my area. They really are the most pointless and annoying things.
Sure, almost. But in the middle of summer? Or winter? Come on now. I lived at an apartment complex that started up leaf-blowers year round at 10am every single Tuesday. What's worse, I worked from home. Even now, having left several years ago, the sound of a leaf blower causes my blood pressure to spike. Destroy them all!
They're very effective and quick for snow removal.
Consider your self lucky… my neighbor's service starts the engines every Tuesday at 7:30 AM sharp.
(BTW, if anyone has any tips how to best manage cross-town-border noise complaints, I'd love to hear them.)
There was even a group of these guys who came straight up to my door, open except for the screen, and blew right into the house. They arrived early and started blowing in that very spot, which is why I hadn't had time to close the door. Just jerks.