Cultivating The Love Apple

I’m not like other people. Story to follow…

We have rows of Norwegian Maples that run down both sides of our street. They are all around the same size and age (~50 ft tall and 30 years old) and I understand they were all planted when the Dutch killed all the Elm trees that used to be there. They are annoyingly intrusive so I have to pull a few dozen seedlings out of the flower beds and my garden every year. But otherwise it’s really nice to live on a tree-lined road. They turn a beautiful shade of golden this time of the year and then drop a thick layer of leaves that coat the world and are quite satisfying to crunch through with your feet or to watch blow around in the wind. Sheboygan does a really great job of keeping the streets tree-lined with many cool types of trees like flowering crabapple, japanese maple, catalpa, and such.

Anyway, this time of the year most people rake the leaves into huge piles near or in the road. We also don’t want the sewers to get blocked so we clear out any leaves that might cause a great flood in the spring. And then a truck that I call “The Giant Suckinator” comes by and collects them. It’s a covered dump truck with a huge vacuum hose that comes over the top of the cab and hangs off of the front of the truck. The driver can remotely make it move around or just wiggle back and forth. I tend to think it looks kind of like an elephant if its trunk started mid-back. And the suction power is pretty impressive. It can demolish piles of wet leaves and I’ve seen one suck up chunks of broken pumpkin. The sound of it also completely terrifies our cats, unsurprisingly since they are already scared of just our house vacuum cleaner and this thing is like the Godzilla of vacuum cleaners with cat-sized hose.  Yikes!

So here’s the weird part. While most people are raking leaves from their yards down to the street to where the Giant Suckinator can get them, I’m hurriedly raking them up from the street and away from where it can get them. I rake them up the slight hill in my front yard and over to my garden. There I wet them down and cover them with a thin layer of dirt to keep them from blowing away. I’ve even stole the neighbors leaf piles while they weren’t looking. The leaves in my garden will break down over the winter and spring and will be nice compost to feed my ‘maters next summer. Also any of the neighborhood’s old pumpkins are fair game. Why would you actually throw your pumpkin out when you can toss it into your garden and compost it? I also filled 3 garbage bags full of leaves and hauled them into the basement. That will be used for worm bedding when I clean out their bins over the winter, spring, and next summer.

And in conclusion, I’m not like normal people.

Mike

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 11:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.