For those of you surrounded by deciduous trees, it’s that time again when the orange, yellow, and crinkly brown leaves flutter to earth. It’s that time again when you can look out your window and view the work tumbling to the ground in every leaf let loose. It takes a dedicated raker to get the job done.
I know because I’ve had to deal with immense layers of leaves since we moved here in the fall of 1980. I’ve had thirty-five years of raking, piling, gathering, bagging, loading, and unloading nature’s dross. Sometimes the process of getting rid of the leaves takes two separate sessions of raking. After one complete raking of the yard, often I get one final mowing of the lawn before the next onslaught of leaves.
When we first raked our leaves into piles, we often raked them onto tarps, and then our kids and I dragged the tarps to the dug-up garden to unload. We had huge mounds in the garden and then had immense bonfires. This was in fact before Castlegar’s burning restrictions came into place.
Often, we came close to accidentally burning the raspberry patch, and one evening we nearly lit up our neighbour’s shed. A few times, we nearly caught the backyard birch-tree on fire, and several times it was severely singed. Our kids loved the bonfires and the marshmallow roasts we had as the fires died down. Usually, I remained outside until midnight and watched the leaf-fire until it was clearly out.
One fall we filled my dilapidated green Datsun’s truck-box with leaves 20 different times and dumped them over the bank at the end of 11th Avenue. Day after day, load after load, it was an enormous chore. A homeowner at that location was glad to acquire the leaves for compost and other yard activities.
Starting in late September or earlier, I would rake the first batch of fallen leaves. The art of it was to rake them to a central point and then work each rake-sweep toward that point. In the end, I might have a dozen first-go piles of leaves. Sometimes, if the leaves were dry, I raked several piles together.
This was fine for bagging, but at that point, our kids (and now our grandkids) decided to use the gigantic piles to jump into, to fall back into, to dive forward into, to tunnel into, and to wrestle in. Their activities scattered the huge pile into many strands, which had to be raked back into one massive stack again.
Over the years, some of our birch trees died and had to be removed. Others had to be topped to be less of a danger due to their dead upper branches falling. One fall my friend H helped me remove two trees that were leafless and dead. Another time, my brother arrived with his chainsaw and took down five enormous birches that had given up the ghost.
Since then, I’ve had to hire fallers and tree-climbing artists such as D to remove major sections from the tops of the trees in my yard. The work of protecting the yard from limbs falling never seems to end–nor does the work of removing the leaves that fall each autumn.
In recent years, we’ve been bagging the leaves. We have a supply of tough orange bags that don’t tear, and you can fill up the bags until they’re tight. After that, friends from around Castlegar area arrive and haul them away as major compost initiatives. If they don’t come for the bagged leaves, then we haul them to the City’s recycling facility behind the complex.
