Joys of Landscaping

We moved in October and the beautiful oaks had started to shed their leaves. Did you know there are 600 different types of oak trees? Neither did I until I moved south. Having lived in Massachusetts and Maine for most of my life I am familiar with Red and White Oak.

"The white oak is a large, strong, imposing specimen. It has a short stocky trunk with massive horizontal limbs. The bark is light ashy gray, scaly or shallow furrowed, variable in appearance, often broken into small, narrow, rectangular blocks and scales.The leaves are dark green to slightly blue-green in summer, brown and wine-red to orange-red in the fall." (Arbor Day Foundation)

Red oak have bristle-tipped leaves and acorns with hairy shell linings.

As kids we used to spend hours hollowing out acorns to make pipes and collecting wheelbarrow fulls to create scarecrows from the acorns found in our neighbors yard. I never thought much of them. I did not know the difference between the two types. The leaves all fell in the fall after turning pretty colors. We raked them and they were gone.

Move to Virginia and I start paying attention to oaks. We spent the first 2 weeks cleaning the house and unpacking the boxes. Then on to the leaves. We spent an entire day removing the foot or so of leaves in the yard. Felt very accomplished and enjoyed seeing the lush green moss now that they were gone.

Blue jay on the feeder and a red wing black bird on the ground! Birds seemed to like that we cleaned up too.

We had a good rain the next day and night and a woke to another foot of leaves in the yard. What! Did they blow in from someone else's yard? Not likely we are fenced in the back and half a mile from the road. They are only supposed fall once as in my childhood.

We spent another day cleaning up leaves. Not as satisfying as the first time. We had moved the first batch into the area behind our fence so it would be out the way. The area was about 3 feet high with the collection of leaves from the first raking, after this one it was about 5 feet high. Again the bright green moss greeted us again.

We spent the next day looking at the property and noticed that the tress still had more leaves. Ugh! We asked family members who said that Pin Oak shed their leaves slowly and possibly over months. Looks like we have Black Oak as well.

Mike took this picture to give you an idea of the size of the leaves we were dealing with. Mike wears a size 12 shoe.

We raked about 7 more times before Winter actually arrived. We got lazy and no longer moved the leaves to the other side of the fence which was now full. We started to rake the leaves just to the edge of the property instead. We would deal with it in the Spring.