Back on the farm, I never even thought about raking leaves. Most of the trees around the house were spruce or pine. The one apple tree, large as it was, did not drop enough to matter.
Here on the shore, however, we are surrounded by ash, maple, poplar, birch and ironwood, with a few cedars and spruce mixed in. There are leaves!
With the first ones that fell, I got out the lawn tractor and chopped them up. The second covering, I raked into the gardens. They will protect the plants and get dug into the ground come spring. I knew there would be another round, a heavy one, to deal with as most of the leaves were still on the trees.
Then, the wind blew, and snow fell. The trees were bare, but the leaves could not be seen. No raking to be done. Then, late last week, the snow melted. I could see that in places the leaves were so thick and matted down that they would kill the grass. And the grass is thin enough as it is.
I would not consider bagging them and disposing of them, but I also couldn't leave them where they were. My first thought was to chop them, but the lawn tractor battery has been giving me trouble all fall. This time, not even an overnight charge was enough to convince it to start. Raking it would be.
Again, I raked leaves into the gardens, creating a thick cover for insects to over-winter. There were plenty of ash seed too, food for critters of all shapes and sizes. I didn't take them all, just focussed on the places they were thickest.
Then, I switched to raking rocks.
The storm that knocked all the leaves off the trees also threw rock onto the shore. Last summer the stony beach was about two and a half meters wide, but rock and stone had been thrown more than a meter onto the lawn. And there is a steep bank of rock between lawn and water. Rock around the shore well is great. But rock is piled onto the metal structure of the dock that was pulled out of the water and placed safely for the winter.
The same thaw that revealed the leaves let me see the rock and gravel on the lawn. I got out the garden rake. It worked well to pull the stone off the grass back to the beach. I was wishing the members of the family that like to skip stones were here to help.
Then, I pulled the crest of the bank of stone down toward the water. The rake gave me good leverage, though larger rocks had to be loosened by hand. Mostly, I was curious to see how hard it would be. Come spring, I will want to cross it carrying a kayak so something a bit less steep would be good. I will want to pull down the bank. But there is no point doing that now as winter winds will change the shape of the shore a couple times.
Changing the bank is optional. Uncovering the dock structure is not. I worked at this a bit, but the rock there had gotten more splash and was frozen. I made some headway. Once the top layer was loosened, the next pulled down pretty easily. I did enough to know how big a job this is going to be.
We were fortunate though. A bit of bank at the corner of the property by the neighbour's break wall was washed out in that storm and these stones were thrown up from the bottom of the bay. Others had a lot more damage.
I may get out to rake more leaves and stones later this week. But snow will come soon. The rest can wait until the weather shifts again, and we see what winter has done to the shape of the land.
Cathy Hird lives on the shore of Georgian Bay, among the trees, beside the stones.