quote:

Originally posted by PASig:
I’m lobbying the finance minister (wife) to buy a yard leaf vacuum with stimulus cash and it looks like it’s a go.

I think my spending nearly a whole day last week raking and blowing and hand bagging about 1,000 lbs of magnolia flower petals off our magnolia convinced her we need to work smarter, not harder here.....

I can sympathize PA, our last house had a huge magnolia and while beautiful when it flowered man what a mess to clean up, especially when they were rained on. I would think that vac may work to some extent. What I did was bag them with my lawn tractor, well it bagged some of it. LOL I could tell when both bags in the back were full because it would start to wheelie, that stuff is heavy! What it didn't pick up I raked and bagged by hand then mulched what was left. The two bags on my John Deere probably held 4 times what the bag in the lawn vac pictured does so you'll be emptying it often.

The way I felt with the huge leaves was to mow first to chop them up, then mow again with the bagger on. It required emptying the bags quite often to transfer to heavy duty contractor bags. I ended up with a pick-up bed heaped full of heavy bags which I dumped at my rural property, saving the bags for the next year.

Thanks for all the info, especially from the ones that had the Billy Goats and said they sucked.

My neighbor actually lent me his Honda HRX 217 and I bagged up all the rest of my litter; the magnolia petals, leaves raked out of flower beds etc in no time at all. Wow, that thing rocked!

I’m now going to buy a HRX 217 and not even bother with a leaf vacuum. He had the hydrostatic model but I see there’s a model with paddle controls, what is better?