New aesthetic needed

With October gone, the leaf blower season in my area is officially under way. Rain and heavy winds have brought down a lot of leaves, and many homeowners feel those leaves need to be disposed of post-haste. That means blowing or raking every last leaf into a pile and stuffing it into a leaf bag or vacuuming it into a truck to be transported to “away,” wherever that is.

Move 'em up and move 'em out

    Two years ago some local citizens rose up to protest the noise and health risks caused by leaf blowers. Some towns around the country have imposed meaningful limits, and some have even succeeded in passing outright leaf blower bans. But here, the team I was backing lost the fight, or at least the first round. We ended up with a complicated new noise ordinance that still allows leaf blowers seven days per week, with gas models permitted before Memorial Day and after Labor Day. 

After Labor Day, gas-powered leafblowers are free to roar in my neighborhood

I think this means the anti-leaf blower faction underestimated the determination of local landscape contractors to defend their business model. Leaf blower noise continues at a cost to the rest of us: loss of quiet enjoyment of our property. I hope we’ll eventually achieve an ordinance with more teeth.

    If I ran the zoo, we wouldn’t need leaf blowers because we wouldn’t clear fallen leaves from our yards. My town, like many, is stuck with a standard of landscape maintenance that dates to the aftermath of World War II. According to this aesthetic, fallen leaves are whisked out of sight as quickly as possible, and an ideal front yard consists of a swath of neatly mown lawn, as big as possible, backed by a few shrubs planted against the house’s foundation.

Neatness reigns

    As I’ve traveled farther along the path to a sustainable garden, I’ve gotten increasingly comfortable with seeing leaves on the ground. Fallen leaves on garden beds used to look like a mess to me. Now they’re a pleasing part of the view, just the way they’d be on a walk in the woods.

Fallen leaves enhance the beauty of the woods

    I’ve learned there are lots of good reasons to let those leaves lie on the ground. They add organic material to the soil as they slowly decompose, providing nutrients for plants and improving soil structure. They offer shelter for native insects, helping them survive the winter. They act as mulch, minimizing the number of weeds I’ll be coping with the next spring, insulating the soil so a sudden thaw or cold snap doesn’t kill my plants, and helping to hold moisture in the soil for roots to access.

Fallen leaves and pine needles benefit this shady bed

    Now I wonder why my neighbors bother to send away all that valuable organic material and then pay to replace it with mulch or soil amendments. If we send those leaves away, we’re actually depleting our own soil, because what our trees drew from the soil isn’t replenished by decomposing leaves.

Why send away organic material that should become part of your soil?

    But the truth is, I wouldn’t be letting those leaves lie if I hadn’t come to find them pretty. In garden design, neater isn’t always better.

Big noise

When I commit murder, my crime will be caused by the scream of leaf blowers. 

I'm going to argue a leaf blower defense

Their piercing whine has escalated again this fall. It messes with my psychic equilibrium. It drives my husband out of bed at 7:00 on Saturday mornings. While almost all landscape contractors and many homeowners in my neighborhood use these infernal machines, the blowers don’t actually add value. What they do add is a lot of negative health effects, both physical and psychological.

    My city is now following a trend toward restricting use of leaf blowers. Last fall the aldermen held hearings on the subject, with landscapers contending that they need the blowers to make a living, while many residents complained they were being tormented by noise generated for others’ profit. The city is considering an ordinance to restrict use of leaf blowers to the periods from March 15 to May 1 and October 15 to December 1. 
 
     This change is too modest for my liking. Why should so many of the best gardening weeks of the year be violated by the noise of leaf blowers? I’d like to know I can enjoy peace and quiet when I step out my back door. Many people testified to lost time for work, conversation, and sleep when the blowers are nearby.

    Other than the obvious effects on quality of life, leaf blowers cause other serious problems. Landscape workers suffer some of the worst of them. 

Hearing protection for operators is often neglected

Sustained exposure to noise at up to 100 decibels, such as that generated by the blowers, can cause permanent hearing loss, raise blood pressure, and lead to coronary artery disease. 

     Some people call the machines debris blowers, because they’re used to move anything lying on the ground, not just leaves. In the process they lift dust, animal feces, landscape chemicals, and whatever else is on the ground into the air, where vulnerable people—especially children and elders—breathe them in. The inefficient two-stroke engines of gas leaf blowers also contribute heavily to air pollution. To top it all off, there’s evidence that the high-velocity stream of air actually damages plants.

    It’s not the case that a lush suburban landscape can’t be maintained without leaf blowers. In fact, Beverly Hills and Carmel, California were early adopters of leaf blower bans back in the 1970s. They’ve managed to struggle by.

This Beverly Hills homeowner has managed to cope without leaf blowers

    We don’t have to let marketing and available technology determine our landscape practices. Who says a neat yard is one with no leaves or twigs on the ground? 

 

In my neighborhood, custom demands no leaves on the lawn

Outdoors is not the same as indoors, thank goodness, and a lawn doesn’t have to look like a freshly vacuumed carpet. 

     We’ve been sold a bill of goods on this, and we’re paying for it every time we’re interrupted by the whine of the leaf blowers. If we could accept more natural conditions, where plant debris is allowed to decompose into the soil of garden beds

Decomposing leaves build soil

and—gasp!—even lawns, we’d save ourselves a lot of money and trouble, and we could dispense with obnoxious landscape machines.