Leave!

Leaves.  They're everywhere.  I never really made the connection between the existence of three cottonwood trees twice the height of my house, and the sheer volume of leaf matter they produce, and then dump, all over the house, the garden, the cars, the path, the street, halfway up the next street and heading out for the highway.  The air intake whatnot on my car is full of dead leaves.  The dustbins (translation for the Americans: trash cans) are slowly filling up with them.  The leaf-blower just shifts them around, and I think it's bad gardening form to blow all your leaves onto your neighbours garden, however tempting.  Autumnal leaf fall comes after the amazing fuzz fall of the summer, where the trees produced mass amounts of white fluffy stuff and dumped it all over the garden, the house, et cetera ad nauseum.  Why have our trees gone bald when everyone else's are still sporting respectable amounts of green stuff?

Maybe they've heard that the sum total of our gardening ambitions for this year is to keep everything below waist height, kill the trumpet vine and the elm, rip out stuff we can't identify (almost everything), and till the whole back garden into a muddy pulp before re-seeding.  Hubby's plan of covering the whole thing with concrete and painting it green is starting to look very appealing