Training trees to drop their leaves correctly

Our trees at the end of their training

After 12 years of training, these two maple trees have finally been trained to drop their leaves right around the trunk. It was a struggle. I should have kept pictures throughout the years so you could see when the trees just dropped their leaves straight down and how it has gotten better each year as I trained them to steer the leaves so that they drop right around the trunk. This makes the leaves much easier to pick up to put in a garden trailer for moving to our huge leaf pile in the back yard.

The hard part turned out to be training the trees NOT to drop their leaves on windy days. The wind makes everything more difficult. So, it's better to just train the trees to stop dropping leaves when the wind is blowing over 10 miles an hour. Below that, the trees seem to be able to still aim the leaves in the correct direction.

The other good thing about the leaves bunched up around the trunk is that when wind speed does get high (this is Cape Cod after all and the wind regularly reaches speeds of 20 - 30 miles per hour on a normal day and higher on a stormy day), the trunk seems to hold the leaves and keep them from dispersing.

So, even though this has been a wet year (it was one of the wettest years we've ever had) and there were a lot more leaves, these trained tree leaves are all gone now. Perhaps you'd like to know how I did this. I used the same methods to train the trees as I used to build this bridge - which I can let you have for a very good price!