Buy a leaf vacuum Sunshines. You can get a really cheap one at Argos for less than £20 or better quality ones at somewhere like B&Q. Mr MB told me earlier today that we will need to replace ours, which has been working overtime this year and is a good few years old, we'll be looking at buying a pretty good one as we have a lot of leaves to vacuum up.

I find the Stihl leaf blower is best and you can chop up the leaves with the Hayter 54 ready to compost. As I said on a thread yesterday my long handled hand fork picks up many leaves on the end with no damage to the plants etc. in the flower beds.

I use my leaf hoover but I paid quite a bit for it some years ago as it has too work quite hard. So you might want to consider how much work it has to do before going for the cheapest option?

thanks to all sounds like just what i need