Publication Date: Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Our Town: The man with a rake
Our Town: The man with a rake
(August 17, 2005) by Don Kazak
A young gardener uses a push broom to clean leaves and debris from the front porch of a house on Castilleja Avenue in Palo Alto. He sweeps them down the walkway to the curb, where he picks up a rake to guide them into a container.
No leaf blower for him, thank you.
But this gardener isn't using a broom and rake because of Palo Alto's new ban on gasoline-powered leaf blowers.
He works for Pedro Garcia Gardening -- and Pedro Garcia has been ahead of the times in leaf-blower-sensitive Palo Alto.
He never liked blowers in the first place.
"I only use a blower on sidewalks and driveways," Garcia said. Now he doesn't even use them for that in Palo Alto. He doesn't own an electric blower.
"The ban won't affect me," he said.
The ban took effect Aug. 1 after a month's grace period to issue warnings to gardeners and homeowners. It carries fines of $100 for the first and second offenses and $200 beginning with the third offense. The city has discussed such a ban, off and on, since 1972.
The city issued 115 warnings to gardeners and homeowners in July for using gasoline-powered blowers.
Garcia is sensitive to noise. But the main reason he doesn't like blowers is because he doesn't think they are good for lawns and gardens.
"It's no good for the plants. It takes nutrients away from them. And (it's) no good for us, too" because of spewing dirt and debris particles into the air, he said.
"It makes the soil too hard," he added. "That's why I use a rake."
Garcia and his crew take longer to work at a client's house than leaf-blowing crews. And Garcia costs more.
"Six is the most houses we can do in one day, sometimes only four," he said. Gardeners using blowers "can do 12 houses in a day, but may spend only 10 or 15 minutes" at each, he said. "That's not enough time to care for a garden, to take care of plants."
Garcia, 34, came to the United States from Mexico in 1991. He started working at age 15 in orchards near a town in Chihuahua, Mexico, where he grew up. Working peach, pear and apple orchards was hard, he said.
That's where he learned to work naturally, without machines.
Now, it's a fad that may catch on.
Garcia started working for local landscape gardener Julia Powers in the mid-1990s and branched off on his own about eight years ago. Powers and Garcia still collaborate. She will often design a garden and he will do the installation.
"He has a good work ethic," Powers said. "He just does not stop until everything is done. He helped teach me that."
Calling Garcia a gardener doesn't cover everything he does, though. He's also a good carpenter and installs irrigation systems, Powers said. He fixed one client's backyard fountain.
He has about 20 clients in Palo Alto, including several in the Southgate neighborhood -- where his crew recently was working with brooms and rakes on Castilleja Avenue.
Jon Stouman, an architect who lives in Southgate, became one of Garcia's clients after he and his wife bought their house in early 2004.
"All we had was gravel," Stouman said. "He collaborated with us when we restored our home. My wife and Pedro and I worked to transform our garden. Now he continues to work with my wife in maintaining it."
Stouman gently bristles at hearing Garcia called "his gardener."
"He's a great collaborator," he said. "He's very observant and he does a great job."
Garcia's work has spread from house to house in Southgate as one neighbor recommended him to another. That's how Stouman found him.
One client noted that Garcia spoke little or no English eight years ago and now is fluent. He now has a crew of five, two new trucks and a home in Half Moon Bay.
It's one of those only-in-America success stories, the kind many immigrants don't experience.
Garcia did it quietly and diligently, with a rake in his hand and staying until the job was done.
Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak can be e-mailed at dkazak@paweekly.com.
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