Suck and Blow

David doesn't get to help me very much while he's in school due to the large amount of projects he has with this program {he logged 112 hours a few weeks ago. eeek}.  But during his spring break we logged some hours at home doing yard work.

I do believe the previous tenants never picked up a rake in the few years that they lived here and we have some rather large trees in both the front and back yard {read: 3 inch thick layer of leaves}.  So we stared raking. And raking. And raking.  We were a few hours into it when David thought we needed another power tool.

We headed to Lowe's and picked up a leaf blower.  He picked out an electric one {so we don't have to worry about gas cans} and headed home to start playing with the new toy.  It's a combo leaf blower/mulcher {it sucks and blows hence the witty title of this post} and came with some assembly required.  The numerous amounts of parts were a little confusing so after tried his hand at putting it together by himself, I gently handed him the instructions... 

  

 So he read.

 And examined.

 And read some more.

 After he figured out how to assemble it, he went to town.  He blew all the leaves into a pile near the fence to make it easier to stuff into the yard bags.  He may have had a little too much fun with this...
He even let me in on the fun...

It wasn't terribly heavy but it was hard to blow the leaves where I wanted them.  David changed the parts and turned it into the mulcher {my favorite part!}.  I have a strange love for sweeping, mopping and vacuuming and since this is somewhat an extension of that, it was my turn to go town.  This thing sucked up the leaves and chops them up into itty-bitty pieces. Awesome!

We spent that entire day outside doing yard work and ended up with 15 {15!} bags for the garbage man.  There are still two piles in the backyard, but one can only do so much in a day {and for a person that hates doing yard work,  a day of it is enough for the whole year}.

We are even seeing some results of our hard work already.  Where there used to be a lot of dirt under those 3 inches of leaves, there are now some green sprouts.  We bought some grass seed as well and threw that out the other day but we shall see how that goes.

Happy Spring!