In Santa Cruz, California Ken Foster, owner of Terra Nova Ecological Landscaping runs a green lawn care and landscaping business. But what's really special about Terra Nova is its website and blog, where Terra Nova explains everything about eco-friendly landscaping.

Ken's recent article about leaf blower madness includes the results of his firm's own real-world test of debris blowers versus rakes and brooms.

Electric leaf blower vs. a rake and a broom. A Terra Nova comparison test.

We believe the grandmother story but for the sake of integrity, we conducted our own comparison test between a leaf blower and a rake and broom.

In the interest of full disclosure it should be known that we used an electric leaf blower, which we do employ from time to time in our landscape maintenance service. (Electric blowers are not as loud as gas blowers but they still make noise and cause particulate matter pollution, and we believe they should be used very sparingly.)

We performed our test at a client’s property, cleaning the exact same concrete walkway area with the exact same volume of leaves and dirt spread out (one trash can full). And we got the same results as the grandma from Southnern Cal. The electric blower took 11 minutes and 56 seconds and the rake and broom took 9 minutes and 17 seconds!

This confirmed our commitment to use a rake and broom as the first option.

This test was conducted in an area that is fairly easy to clean and, because there are places that the electric blower is indeed faster than a broom, our leaf blower position is this: We do not use gas leaf blowers ever. We commit to using a rake and broom first and an electric leaf blower as the last option after all impacts are considered.

We support a gas leaf blower ban because we believe we would have a healthier more peaceful world without them.