I have a Toro leaf blower/vacuum. Shreds nicely for dry brown leaves, but freshly fallen autums leaves or wet leaves do not shred as well, they mainly get vacuumed up and partially broken. My pinecones are about 1.5 inches (daughter calls them the "baby cones") and we get plenty. I rake them out of my garden beds and lawn into a pile on the lawn. Then I use the leaf vacuum and suck them up. They chop up into a fine reddish brown mulch. Even applied in spring, these shredded cones have not led to any pine tree sprouts. The mulch smells nice if you like the smell of pine. WARNING - very dusty job. The bag that collects the shredded material will send out dust from the shredded pine cones, more than the dust from leaves. If there is a medium wind, I do it standing upwind of the bag so that the dust blows away from me. The earthworms LOVE the beds I have applied the pinecone mulch.

Okay, I'll leave it be and hope for the best. The pine nuggets seemed perfect, with some pieces being dime sized at the largest and some being really fine mulchy stuff. I'll see if I can get a picture when I go down to my mother's house this weekend, I don't remember the brand name. Was a massive bag for pretty reasonable though, I've used that stuff for nearly ALL of my plants this last repotting season. While most are houseplants, for edibles I planted an olive and a cherry tree in soil amended with it. Guess I'll just see what happens over the winter!

I have a stucco house - I feel your pain! Sounds like you are in a location that does not have a lot of stucco homes, hence the lack of local expertise. The trick is finding someone who knows what they are doing. Traditional three coat stucco systems are not hard, just time consuming. Does your historical society have a reference? Are there are other stucco homes in the area? If so start asking other homeowners who they know who does work. Anyone doing historical stucco would get their supplies thru a concrete supplier and they might have references. I taught myself how stucco myself after we restored our upstairs dormer. There is a lot of info out there - some parts of the country still do a lot of stuccoing - you just have to dig around. I ended up finding a guy who repairs the stucco for a local large university. He was very helpful - which formula was used on my house, his opinions on stucco wrap vs roofing felt, etc. Since it sounds like moisture is your nemesis in your area (mine too) so make sure you really research how to keep your substrate dry. (hint: it does not involve spraying the stucco directly onto the sheathing.) Try this link http://www.cement.org/stucco/faq.asp as a starting point. Chances are that whoever does stucco for you is a smaller company or one man outfit so it might take you a while to find someone. Just make sure you know what you want and how you want it done before you commit to someone. The following link has a good background on stucco and offers some help in determining what kind of stucco you have. Here is a link that might be useful: historical stucco

Coniferous forests always make me think of ticks. Hiding. Lurking. Just waiting to give you some disease. See guys, I'm not friendly to ALL arachnids; that's gotta be something, right?