There's Someone In My Head But It's Not Me

There’s Someone In My Head But It’s Not Me

On November 5, 2009, in Life in New England, by Wilfried F. Voss

4CBA3925E4D34D6F Imagine roughly one acre of land covered with oak leaves and pine tree needles. Imagine a crazy man in the middle of it, raking the leaves, wobbling his head, and singing “There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.”

Well, the crazy man is yours truly, and the line is from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. As usual, when I work outside, I have my iPhone with me and listen to music while I’m working. It took the entire last weekend and the following days to blow and rake the vast amount of oak leaves into strategically positioned piles. The weather was cooperating, meaning the leaves were all dry and the leave blower was in full action. Now, crazy as I am, I am waiting for the rain to compact the piles so that I can pick them up and put them into our compost piles.

The area of roughly one acre is the front part of our property, and there are about fifteen oak trees plus the same number of pine trees growing in roughly the same space. They are between 60 and 80 feet high. The problem with oak trees in New England is that they shed their leaves between October and March. I usually spend between two and three weekends in the fall removing leaves, and another weekend in spring for the final clean-up.

The other problem with oak trees is that their leaves take forever to rot. If I wouldn’t remove the leaves, we would end up with a leaf cover roughly one feet high, and the leaves would suffocate any other plant life beneath them.

The next problem is that the leaves clog up our gutters. Years ago we had the gutters installed to prevent the rain water from flooding our basement (the previous owners apparently didn’t mind). Little did we know at the time that we also need gutter guards. I bought some “easy to install” gutter guards at the local Home Depot, but now I am ready to kill the person who came up with the “easy to install” line and who doesn’t know our gutters. It seems we will have to live another season with temporarily cleaned gutters.

The good thing about oak trees is that they make good fire wood. I prefer not to remove trees, but in this case it makes sense, not only to save some valuable times by not removing leaves, but also to get more sunshine on the property and being able to plant more colorful trees and plants.

Well, again, this is life in New England. And by the way, just the last few days I peeled about 20 pounds of apples and roughly 20 pounds of pears. My wife canned apple sauce and diced pear. We are getting earthy-crunchy!