Leaf blowers constantly buzzing

By Karina Rook

Boy they love their leaf blowers in California – I hear them all day long.

The Mexican gardeners look after everyone’s gardens in our neighborhood. I don’t how much they charge as our landlord pays for them to look after our place. They arrive in a pickup (think ute but bigger) and three guys spend about 15 minutes at your house, then leave and move on to the next job. They work hard and fast – one guy on the whipper snipper trimming edges and bushes as well as tufts of grass that stand out, another does leaf blowing to move all the trimmings and leaves to a collection area, then the final guy picks up the mess and puts it in our compost bin. The leaf blower is also passed over the outside of the house to get rid of dust and cobwebs. We aren’t getting the lawns mown as they’re not growing much, hopefully that will change towards the end of Fall and into Winter.

Aside from the noise pollution, other affects of using leaf blowers are:

• Dust inside the house where windows are left open
• Doormats are crooked or blown away somewhere in the yard
• Any kind of mulch on garden beds gets blown off and composted

So all the garden beds are dry exposed soil. People surround the base of large trees with river stones (they can’t get blown away) and we have some white gravel covering a garden bed.

Sometimes I wish the gardeners would just use a broom and stop polluting, but I know they are probably under-paid and need to get the work done as fast as they can. Besides, I use noisy tools in my job like the clothes dryer, dishwasher and vacuum cleaner and I wouldn’t want to do any of those tasks manually!