Diabolical Leaves Yield to God’s Favor

God keeps helping me break through barriers.

Today I broke the oak leaf barrier.

My property contains thousands of useless oak trees. They’re not white oaks, red oaks, black oaks, or chestnut oaks; those species are useful. They’re live oaks and various scrubby, crappy oaks which produce bad lumber and drop horrible leaves that kill everything they land on.

Ever since I moved here, I’ve been trying to get rid of oak leaves. I bought a leaf blower, and when I aimed it at the leaves, they actually moved closer to the ground. They refused to be blown away. I bought a mulching kit for my 60″ mower deck, and the leaves ignored it. I bought a 50″ sweeper, and it only removed loose leaves. Leaves that were farther down in the crud column refused to move. Also, Spanish moss kept wrapping around the sweeper’s axles and immobilizing them.

Recently, I bought a harrow. This is a heavy steel thing you drag. It’s like a net made of 3/8″ steel rod, with tines protruding downward from it. It loosened leaves so the sweeper would actually pick them up.

This was a big development. It meant I had some hope of getting rid of packed-down leaves, as long as I was willing to stop the sweeper several times an hour and pull Spanish moss off the axles with pliers.

Today I ran the harrow and sweeper, and then I decided to get out one of my leaf blowers. Miracle of miracles…the leaves moved. The harrow had loosened them to the point where they could no longer grab the dirt and hold on. While laughing at me.

I blew a tremendous amount of leaves into the woods. I was able to see grass, or bare dirt where grass used to be, in many areas. I can see my driveway. I worked for about four hours.

The blower isn’t ideal. It’s a one-hand blower with a gas engine. It would be perfect for a 1/4-acre lot with reasonable leaves, but I need something more powerful. I have a much stronger electric blower, but the battery only runs 20 minutes, and a second battery is $200+.

I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to buy a gas-powered backpack blower that could knock a truck over. Echo makes one that puts out over 1000 cfm. That’s almost twice what my electric blower puts out.

They say the big Echo is so strong, you can dig holes with it. That’s what I’m talking about.

It’s amazing that my yard requires a tractor, a harrow, a sweeper, and a high-end blower to clean up the leaves, but that’s how it is when successive generations of landowners fail to cut undesirable trees and replace them with better ones. If I had hickories and pecans instead of oaks, I could get rid of my leaves with a rake. I’d also have valuable timber.

I may also buy a peach tree. The man who built my house made some bad plant decisions, and one bad choice was a maple tree 15 feet from the house. Here, maples grow maybe 80 feet tall, and sometimes we get tropical-storm-force winds. Hello? Fortunately, I guess, lightning hit the maple about 15 seconds after my dad closed on the house, and in March, it keeled over and landed in my driveway. I need something to replace it.

I will not even consider citrus. People who buy citrus are in denial. Citrus greening is going to kill every single citrus tree in North America, except for a few varieties. It’s a done deal. When you buy citrus, you’re investing in failure. Besides, I don’t want to be reminded that I’m in Florida. I want my property to look as much like Tennessee or Ohio as possible. The other day I cut a healthy pygmy date palm in pieces and put it on my burn pile.

I have considered buying a peach tree before, but the only varieties that work are strange creations that come from the University of Florida. I figured they had to taste bad. There had to be some sacrifice, in order to get a peach that will produce in hot weather. A friend tells me I’m wrong. He lives in Kissimmee, and he grows good peaches.

He got his tree at Home Depot, of all places. If he can do it, so can I.

I don’t know about the peach tree, but I’m definitely getting a blower, and if things work out, in a month, I may have a yard that looks like a yard. Maybe God will show me how to kill the awful weeds. Maybe he’ll help me find a type of grass that resembles a real lawn.

The interior of the house is very clean. I even got the bird cages clean, which was impossible in the past. Now the order is spreading to the yard, the pasture, and the woods. It’s too much. I love it.

I don’t know why I couldn’t get all these things together before. It must have been my unequal yoking with my then-non-Christian dad. I partnered with a person who chose to live under curses.

I’m on a roll. Thanks to God, every single day is good.