Posts Tagged ‘before/after’
Another Cut
I’ve written about our frustration over waiting for our hay-field to get cut before the weeds had a chance to go to seed. Now that those fields have been cropped clean, my attention turned to knocking down the weeds and troublesome invasive plants growing rampant on the other side of our driveway.
When I finished mowing, I took a picture.
A day later, Cyndie showed me a photo album our friend Melissa shared with pictures from her visit, days earlier. I couldn’t resist grabbing Mel’s gorgeous image from a similar vantage point, taken before I had mowed.
It causes me a little regret, because the visual of the before/after doesn’t necessarily look like an improvement. There are a few butterflies that aren’t very happy with me, as well. I’m hoping they will find their way over to Cyndie’s other gardens where she has offerings that are desirable to both us and them.
As much as we love the natural look of our uncut field on the north side of our driveway, it contains problem plants that we don’t want migrating across to the hay-field we have been working to improve for years.
One future possibility we are considering is doing a prairie restoration. That process starts with a prescribed burn, which makes it a production that we can’t accomplish all on our own and will need a fair amount of planning and follow through to bring to fruition.
It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it is involved enough that it won’t just occur on a whim.
Until then, we will continue to periodically cut down the growth as a way of controlling the weeds from completely taking over.
Sorry, butterflies.
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Quick Work
When you only have a limited amount of daylight in which to get your work done, you find a way to work quickly.
After seeing how nice the front yard looked after I mowed it to a close cut on Sunday, I desperately wanted to have the same result in the back. With the beautiful weather blessing us for another day, I made a point of rushing home from work and changing into grubby clothes.
There wasn’t much that needed to be done in preparation, so in no time I was on the back hill mowing all the leaves that had fallen. I made one pass around the perimeter and stopped to take a picture, hoping to get a “before” and “after” combination.
That image was lit with sunshine that would last barely another hour. Unsure whether I would have enough light to get an “after” shot, I picked the angle for this view and got down to business.
Since I was cutting very short, areas where the moles have wreaked havoc became much more glaring than when I leave it longer, but taken as a whole, the turf landscape looked rather noble by the time I was through.
Before snapping the second shot, I snuck a peek at the first image, because I’d already forgotten where I had stood to take it. For as little effort as I put toward aligning them precisely, I am tickled to have ended up with a shot that almost perfectly matched the earlier view.
The only thing missing was the sunshine, which was below the horizon by that point.
The hill is ready for becoming a sled run, in the off-chance we end up getting enough snow for that this winter, what with the “Godzilla-of-all-El-Niños” forecast to be moderating our temperatures in the months ahead.
If our current spell of good weather fortune is any indicator, we could be in for a short ski and igloo season this year.
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Relative Something 