Organic Confetti

When we were all first buying houses one of my friends properly decided "puttering around the yard" applied to any outdoor activity related to landscaping that you could accomplish while holding onto a beer. Mowing the lawn or raking, then, wasn't puttering, but watering was as was wandering around, plucking the occasional weed or kicking at things with the toe of your boot.
It was a good distinction then and it remains one I use today.

A few months back I bought a conspicuous consumer item, one of those lawn hog mulcher / blower things. I never had any use for a blower (I use a rake), but I was tickled by the thought of vacuuming my yard clean of all the leaves deposited by my neighbors with trees. The contraption is a noisy beast and fairly ungainly, but it works passably well.

It is, of course, designed more for providing the finishing touches on lawns that resemble golf courses, where it would be excellent if you had a long enough extension cord, which you couldn't, but its biggest advantage is it turns whatever it manages to suck up into tiny pieces. It used to be that a good raking would overflow my one furnished green yard bin, but now I can fit about three times as much into it. Although you might conclude that I, therefore, do three times as much yard work, you would be wrong.

Even though the thing pretty much requires two hands (one to hold it and one to aim it at the ground), it's still puttering in my book. You could, if demanded, operate it with just the one hand since the bag on the business end of the thing has a handy strap that fits over your shoulder. It's quite fun to turn the thing on and immediately experience the flat and empty bag explode four times its size as it fills with air in an instant.

The drawback is that it has its limits, as do we all. Twigs and large pieces that it refuses to accommodate hang around the opening and act like a filter. You have to occasionally shut the damn thing off and remove them or else nothing it can handle will be sucked into the vortex of mulching. It's not bad, but I've learned that over time unless you rake this stuff up it quickly becomes the majority of what you're trying to handle. Right now on the side of the house there's a mass of one part leaves to about six or seven of twigs.

One of the other benefits to the gadget is that whenever I use it all the neighbors know I'm cleaning things up. They may not think so, otherwise. I find Saturday or Sunday mornings the best time to fire up the beast since I imagine it interrupts their pleasant breakfast conversation about what a slackard I am. I'm sure it doesn't stop their complaining, but it lessens it in one regard.

The other thing is that it easily sucks up as much dust and dirt as it does yard matter. The advantage to that is I resemble nothing so much as a coal miner after using it for a bit, which makes me look as if I've been working.

When, all along, it's just puttering.