Leaf Blowers Make for Barren Earth
The Saturday after the Fourth of July was the quietest in recent memory in my neighborhood. Not because everyone was sleeping late after the previous day’s festivities, but because the gardeners left their leaf blowers in the truck. Only the hum of lawn mowers and the occasional chipping sound of an edger hitting cement broke the morning quiet.
Working in the front yard, I cut back some overly tall tomatoes and deadheaded old yarrow, in such comparable calm that I thought I was on holiday.
My revelry was, it turned out, short-lived, as the ban on leaf blowers in Los Angeles was overturned only three days later.
The screeching, high-revving noise from leaf blowers is what most people complain about and what got them briefly banned, though as an avid home gardener, I have several other objections to leaf blowers.
When people ask me why their garden is not doing well, one of the first things I ask is “Do you mulch?”
A walk through any woodland, even that dwarf, dry forest called the chaparral, will find nature covering her ground with a thick, healthy layer of decomposing leaf and branch litter. Only the desert floor is bare soil.
The rest of the plant kingdom requires mulch. That’s how nutrients are returned to the soil, how structure is built, so a soil can sustain plant life. When hired gardeners go through the landscape with a leaf blower, they are torching the earth. Soils treated this way soon look like those photos coming back from Mars.
One of the hottest concepts in gardening right now is sustainability, that nothing be added to the garden, or subtracted. When gardeners blow, or rake up, everything in sight, some call it “clean,” but I call it barren.
If they send this organic material to the dump, even in the green can, they are robbing the soil of nutrients and structure. Any soil scientist will tell you so.
With the organic matter gone, gardeners must add quantities of fertilizer to the soil, which eventually leaches into the earth and pollutes our water. The city has to figure out what to do with all the organic matter to keep it out of landfills. The garden is no longer self-sustaining, it now strains at resources.
Bare soil, parched or sodden, is a bad sign in a garden, even if some of us think this neat and tidy. A friend’s dad used to sweep bare a half-acre of soil around his house in Texas and thought that looked neat and tidy, but it isn’t my idea of husbandry.
Dust Devils
The blower is very efficient at moving dust, which probably shouldn’t be recycled into the garden since much of it comes from particulate pollutants such as bus exhaust and brake linings, though I suspect that a lot of this dust simply comes from gardeners blowing upwind.
I know that my car gets a whole lot dirtier since blowers came on the scene after the drought of the late 1980’s, when hosing off properties was banned. When the gardeners arrive in my neighborhood, it’s a wise idea to close all the windows unless you’re really into dusting the house.
I also wonder about all the snail bait and pesticides that people put on the ground that a blower makes airborne.
Hosing is one alternative to blowers, but I now question where all that dirt goes. Down the storm drains and straight to the beach? At least hosing settles dust, if only temporarily.
Rakes and brooms are, of course, another alternative. My wife and I rake and sweep the garden’s paths and patios, depositing the questionable dirt in the garbage and the leaf litter in the compost pile, where it is returned to the garden in time. In garden beds, much of the leaf litter remains in place as a 2 to 3-inch mulch under plants.
That’s why my soil is a rich, dark brown color. It’s full of organic life.
I find raking fun, sweeping a bit of a chore, so I have experimented with small electric blowers. They are not very efficient, and a whole lot harder to use than one might think. Things tend to be blown in all directions and it takes some skill to get it moving in the right direction.
I should emphasize that I have experimented with blowers only on the stuff that the rake doesn’t clean up, and I blow it back into the garden beds. I rarely send any organic matter to the dump. Only rose canes, the nearly uncompostable leaves from the street tree, and prunings from my neighbor’s overactive hedge go into the green can.
Because electric blowers are weak in comparison to the shrieking gas-powered machines, they tend not to raise clouds of dust, but merely shuffle it toward the garden beds. My current favorite is a rechargeable one that is fairly lightweight and being cordless, easier to use, but most of the time, we still rake and sweep.
Because I am an avid gardener, and because my property is not very large, little lawn remains. The front yard is the oddball on the street, full of drought resistant perennials, herbs, vegetables and berries--a real cottage garden in front of a cottage-sized house. The back has a sliver of lawn, that I mow myself, surrounded by more plantings.
For several years, turf experts have been telling us that lawn clippings should be left on the lawn, cut into small pieces by special machines called “mulching” mowers. No, they say, this does not cause thatch, the spongy debris that accumulates in lawns, but, yes, it does return the clippings to the soil as fertilizer. Sucking them up or blowing them off is now considered a bad idea.
Better Options
Blowing debris against the foundation of the house, or a fence, is also a bad idea. When I recently rebuilt my rotted fence I found that neighboring gardeners had been blowing debris up against the base, which contributed to its premature demise. Piled against the base of the house, it invites termites.
Another reason given for postponing the ban was to allow manufacturers time to come up with quieter blowers. They’ve had years to do this--this problem hasn’t exactly burst suddenly upon the scene--but even quieter kinds would solve only part of the problem. There’s still the dust and the bare earth.
Leaf vacuums might be an improvement, if the contents were put back into the garden as mulch, or put into a compost pile that the gardener could maintain for non-gardening homeowners.
True, gardeners would have to charge more--good gardening practices do take more time--but in my book it would be a small price to pay for a healthier garden that consumed fewer resources and sent less to the dump. A step toward sustainability and more peaceful Saturdays.
