New Leaf Shredder

Last year, about this time, I moved into a new house. The only problem is the trees !! Don't get me wrong - I love the trees, but at this time of the year, they all fall down. The previous owner told me he picked up about 70 bags. Last year I just made a big pile, let it pass the winter, and then stuck it in a 4x4 composter - it was still 6 feet high!!

Last year - to try and make things easier, I also bought a leaf vacuum. Now this is an electric one and so it does not suck as much as it should and is an overall pain in the ass to operate. I ended up raking the lawn anyway.

This year I decided to get a smaller portable blower-vac - the Toro Ultra Blower Vac.

this is a fairly compact model - but I like it. The plan seems to be like last year - make a few big piles, and then mulch, mulch, mulch. While last year we eventually used a rake, this year I will have the blower. Having tested this out this afternoon I think this will work out great.

In part of my tests, I wanted to see how much it really reduced - the box says 16:1 - but nobody thinks those are reasonable. Since I had some bags already raked up - I decided to mulch them to see.

In the picture here is the original bag . This was actually pretty packed down as it came out as a solid chunk (it had been bagged a few days ago only). Passing it through the vac, I had to empty it twice - though it was only half full the last time.

After having placed it back in the bag we ended up with about a third of the original size. Now There are two things here - 1) my original bag was packed and could probably expand to 2 or 3 unpacked bags - though I doubt anyone would really do that. 2) my second bag was not packed down - If I had more, I could probably pack it down a lot more than that (I will see).

So I think 16:1 is pushing it from a practical sense (everyone packs the bags down) but a 6:1 reduction or even a 10:1 - maybe.

Since much of this will just be going in my composte bins (I am saving some for bedding mulch) I wanted to see how much I could reduce by passing it though again. The second pass fit in one vac bag, and the third time had a little room left over. The picture shows what it looked like after 3 passes. For mulch this is pretty good - for composting, I have done better with my mower - but this is cleaner and easier - though I could probably suck up the stuff that I mowed over with it.

Overall though, I am happy with the Toro as I tested, I will probably have more once I finish my yard this year.

One other thing - Toro (and others) sells attachments so that we can connect this directly to the paper waste bags or garbage bins. The stores around my area don't seem to sell them - but I will be trying to see if this will help much.

Visit to a few local fairs

Over the weekend we went to a few little local events here in Chateauguay to try and get a better feel for our new home. These included :

• A local farmers-like market
• The English speakers community arts and craft fair(They're new to me)
• The Marche-Eco on isle Saint-Bernard.

Whle these were pretty small - about dozen booths at the most - I still managed to find some local (semi local) products that I thought were pretty cool.

Pepper Jam - Yummy

At the craft fair, I found a nice lady, Treasa Kenny, who did Jams. She's local from St-remi, and had a nice selection of homemade jams. I fell for the hot pepper apricot - has the tartness of the apricot jam, the heat of the peppers and retained a good pepper taste. The company is we bee jammin - no web site (yet) but you can get in touch @ 450-454-4808.

The Marche Eco on the island allowed to find out much more about the history of the island (the original setlement back in the 1700's) and meet with some local merchants.

Bird feeders

One merchant, Francois Frappier, had an excelent display of birdfeeders and feeding stations. We have a few Blue jays that visit us - so we were trying to figure what we could do to get them to hang around. The varing models allowed for the smaller birds to feed without being crowded out by the larger birds - pretty cool. also given were tips on keeping the squirells out. Not only is Francois pationate about the ffeders but birds as well. His web site is full of local birdwatching outings as well as a good look at the products he puts together. These products were spotted all over the reserver on the island.

Beer - its what for supper.

Found a new Brewer that I had not seen at the Mondial - brasseur de montreal - though they were there. They had on hand their standard 6 pack as well as a new one - The Mexican - which is one of the "hint of lime" beers. I found that one a little too light (not enough beer taste - but I am fan of stouts) - but the "Lodon Ruby" was realy good a nice brown ale. Close to work - and they are a brew pub - need to talk to the social comitee !!

That was it for the weekend outings. 'till next time.

MAC Stuff

So I finally broke down and did 2 things:

• I bought a MAC - Specifically a MAC mini
• I bough a backup server - an HP Smart media server

Cool thing about the media server is will do full backups of both windows and MAC systems, allow a "bare metal" restore.

This morning though, I saw that my CPU was way up, the last backup failed, and my CPU was off the charts. Looking around I found that it was an MDS and MDSworker process. It seems spotlight (the MAC background search tool) was indexing the backup server.

So I had to go in and remove the backup server from the spotlight indexing in the system setting panel. This was not that tough a job, but to a new Mac guy - it was a surprise.