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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has worked landscaping on commercial sites and large apartment buildings and been yelled at or treated like shit for using a leaf blower to do it. You go try raking a truck full of leaves without one, making sure you get every corner and crevice underneath bushes and back corners so you don't get yelled at by customers or the boss. Not that you don't have to rake it all after anyway into large tarps or garbage cans that you then drag and carry by hand. Now do this in pouring rain, or snow, or when the leaves are frozen.

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.

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When I was younger, my mom had a house with a large house full of oak trees.

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.

> 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.

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.

There is one additional perk to exercise as opposed to tasks. Work tends to involve straining physical repetitive labor. Dedicated exercise can be more targeted and fits differing constraints. Of course vanity is part of the reason for that optimization - just like a full body tan is more 'fashionable' than a farmer's tan working out can focus more on 'mirror muscles' than practicality.

Just look at Olympic weightlifters - they tend to look plump but they certainly are well strong as Olympic weightlifters.

"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

It's the same reasoning used by computer enthusiast on why RGB led on any peripheral are now profitable.

The same reasoning for accessorizing cars to look like UFO.

If it's any consolation, I think we all agree this is a general human problem instead of a problem with the men doing the labor. Why does the company require this service? Why do customers request it? How can people think a few leaves are bad? Etc.

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."

I kinda wanted to respond to all the comments generally here. I agree with most of what you all say. Landscaping, at least the way I spent a lot of time doing it is ridiculous. I have no idea why customers request the things they do, I honestly have no idea why people spend so much money making the outside space of their property into a sterile tidy space. It's never really sat well with me.

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.

100%. I often wonder what the landscapers themselves actually think about leaf blowers and other power tools.

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.

Right, I don't think the blame should be placed on the poor bastard who is forced to use the infernal machine on pain of being thrown out of his house. The problem needs to be addressed at a higher level. In this case, there is a simple solution: leaf blowers should be banned.

I call BS on the pouring rain and snow: wet, frozen leaves are not blowing anywhere.

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.

Nah...a commercial leaf blower makes frozen leaves fly really good. We used one of the stihl ones. With a rake you lift large chunks of frozen solid frozen organic matter that you have to try and rake away a layer at a time. I'm telling anyone that doubts it to go try it. A whole apartment complex worth of frozen wet leaves. You've got 3 hours to get it all done before moving to the next site. Try it. Do it one day with a rake. Then head back next week late autumn after a good wind and rain storm and do it again with a leaf blower and see how much faster and easier it goes.

Wet leaves stick to paved / metalled surfaces such that rakes & brooms ride right over them.

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...

I see much more necessity in 24/7 transport than in leaf blowers.

I agree it's better to let them decay in lots of cases.

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.

Some trees (walnut) have poisonous leaves that can't be left to decay in place and must be treated and removed, but this is the best option in the majority of cases, yes.

Except when the leaves form a coating over grass that grows mold, and you are allergic to mold, which will also kill the grass. You don't have to remove every last leaf, just enough to give the grass breathing room.

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.

I'm just wondering.. poisonous to who/what? Kids? Pets? How long are they poisonous for while decaying?

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!)

Normally to other plants, rarely for animals (see: poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac). In really extreme cases can be very dangerous even to burn it (but nobody has a manchineel in their garden). Walnut can poison the soil for a couple of years so is better put its fallen leaves on a isolated compost pile. It depends on the species and the chemistry of the soil.

Wow, thank you, I had no idea. The walnut tree uses the poison to kill competitors, up to 20m away or more.

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"

And is not only the walnut, a lot of common trees do this in fact. Pines for example.

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