Wow, a whole season of our year came and went since I last wrote. We commenced the yearly "leaf harvest" on Sunday, November 12 and finished up on Monday, November 20. We dedicated most of 5 days to the endeavor! While we can't do a lot of conversing due to how loud raking leaves can be, it's still wonderful family fun. Terah and Alida's help is sporadic, but they love to be part of it and are fabulous at the piling squishing via jumping and pushing each other into the leaves. AND (see future blog post dedicated to this!) Tala was able to join us for a lot of it!!
Sometimes when my mind is just churning with events near and far and the world feels like a chaotic, unpredictable place that I have relatively little impact on, it's really nice to throw myself into a very predictable task - remove leaves from our neighbor's yard and bring them to our leaf pile. Ah, that I can do! The progress is easy to see and celebrate (with all sorts of flips and flops!).
We first did the raking around our place on the travel paths through the woods. We used those leaves for mulching various paths in many of our gardens. In some instances it first meant scooping the now decomposed leaf matter up onto beds before applying fresh leaves. What a satisfying job!
We also loaded the piggies up with leaf bedding...
...and tidied up a few areas where the chickens had done an extraordinary job of pulling stuff from the woods into the yard! They are so good at moving things around!
Then we shifted our attention to our neighbor's very large yard. The trees are just getting bigger over there. This is the first year we did not get all the leaves before we needed to call it quits. Last year we discovered that masking while jumping in the leaf pile saved us from a lot of lung irritation (itty bitty silver lining of Covid is that we always have a plethora of masks around). And this year, due to intense smoke from the many wildfires in our area, we wore masks most of the time for several days of raking. And, surprise surprise, we coughed a lot less while raking!
Under the leaves we often find a lot of acorns and so we started loading the piggies up with treats. I love dumping in a bin of leaves and acorns and watching them sort the pile and crunch on the delicious morsels!
We hit a record on our final day, collecting 6 trailer loads PLUS lots of acorns. As you can see, the light was waning when we were loading up the final sheet-fulls. Each load is one massive cloth filled with leaves and then 12 sheets loaded up. We should be all set for the year - for animals, gardens and our humanure compost system.
This time if you've made it to the end of a lot of leaf pictures, you get to enjoy some of my favorite jump shots!
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