Bowing to Reality

I spent about five hours on Saturday pulling weeds (especially the healthy amount of blackberry and ivy starts), which means that our gardens are lovely and that I finally got a good look at our roof from the back side of our house. Wow.



Note especially the red-from-pine-needles roof, and the trees sprouting in the gutter at lower right. Hmmm. Apparently we need to run a tighter ship in September – none of this was there four weeks ago!

Between the sight of the roof, and watching our neighbour and his electric blower, I finally caved and gave my blessing to buying a needle-blowing noise-machine. I’m still not proud that we have it in our garage, but realistically, you just can’t do that many square feet of roof with a push broom (and we’re allegedly 10 years into a 30 year roof, so I’m sure that every acidic pine needle that’s blown off is a blessing). Kevin was thrilled – he knew exactly the model he wanted. We still had a $50 gift card from Sears due to the water heater fiasco last fall, and so it was free. Nice! Here he is, blowing the last few needles from the roof.



It seems to work on gutters, too, or at least the top portion of them! We’ll do a more thorough pass of them in a week or two once the tree guys come to take out the four trees. We’re taking out two on each side of the house – 3 80-100+ foot pines and one sweetgum. We’re planning to get the stumps ground on the west side of the house and ignore the eastside for now. But I’m sure the tree-removing will produce more pine needles than we’ve seen so far, so the new blower will get quite the work out. :-)

One last question – does anyone in the Pacific Northwest have suggestions for removing moss from a roof?? The internet says a lot about vinegar (bonus points for being cheap), but I’m all ears if you have better suggestions. It’s only October and we already have a bumper crop.