Posts Tagged ‘cutting grass’
Nonstop Mowing
When the order of the day involves cutting the grass or trimming the sides of our trails, there isn’t much in the way of adventures to write about. It was hot in the direct sun, the mower worked perfectly, I accomplished a little more area than I thought I would yesterday, and I still have over a day’s worth left to finish. That’s not counting the fence line trimming that usually takes several days to fully complete.
Even though I have so much groundskeeping work to do, we won’t get anything done this morning because we have a brunch date in River Falls with some old Eden Prairie acquaintances. To my family and old EP friends, the names Herzog and Westerhaus might ring a bell. You never know who you might come across in life after a move to the country like we did over twelve years ago.
That’s about it. Since that’s all I’ve got, I’ll throw in a photo Cyndie took of the horses grazing in the freshly cut hay field.
One added note: Cyndie just described a successful exercise with Asher off-leash while she was trimming small branches from the large oak limb that fell. (We don’t see much of each other on days when I mow and she is busy with other projects. I hear about her adventures later.) She said he busied himself exploring the woods for a while as she worked, then eventually wandered over to sit upright nearby on the trail and waited until she finished.
Good dog.
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Detail Oriented
Someone made a reference to me being anal in some of the things I do, in this case, related to my methods tending to the horses’ emptied grain feed bags. I’m not going to argue with that assessment, though I might use other words to describe my proclivity for order. I can come across as rather particular about how I want things to look around here. Maybe even fussy. Meticulous. Discriminating. Fastidious?
I can be detail-oriented. The height of the unmowed grass when we arrived at our driveway was rather shocking. That was a detail that was hard to miss. A less astute person might not pay attention to the grass growing in the seam of the concrete apron of the shop garage.
Was I being anal when I got on my knees and plucked all of those out before setting off on the riding mower? At least it looks like someone actually lives here again.
The grass blades were ten inches tall in some places along the driveway where I started cutting as soon as we got home yesterday. I needed to let go of my usual fussiness about achieving a clean-looking cut and settle for a version I’ll call: at-least-it’s-been-cut.
The mower balked a little at the complications of such long grass, but I think it still did an impressive job for an electric. The exit chute plugged once, and one of the blade motors overheated a couple of times. I needed to use the higher blade speed setting, which drains the batteries faster than normal, so I didn’t get as far as I wanted before quitting for the day.
There was a thunderstorm last night, so I don’t know if the grass will be dry enough to start mowing right away this morning. If it’s not, there is plenty of trimming to be done with the string trimmer and the hedge trimmer that I don’t mind doing when it’s wet.
I’ll be playing catch-up for a few days before starting over without pause to get a more reasonable, cleaner second cut before it has a chance to grow much.
The freshly cut hay field looks great, but that makes the tall grass left along the fence lines stand out that much more as needing to be addressed. Beyond that, the work of cutting up the giant oak limb remains as a large burden on the to-do list.
Lazy days on the lake are definitely over. For a couple of weeks, anyway. We plan to head up again for a 4-day weekend in the middle of the month. Then, again, the week after that, so don’t feel sorry for me in the least.
I look forward to seeing what the remains of the lodge destruction will look like upon our return. I like paying attention to the details of the work they are doing.
Before we left yesterday morning, we stopped down to watch the start of the serious demolition getting underway.
Might be time for an update to the song I wrote about Wildwood.
The old lodge don’t look the way it used to look…
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Rough Start
The day dawned full of promise yesterday, and I had a long list of things I wanted to accomplish. The biggest thing I ended up accomplishing was overcoming a series of frustrations in the morning that threatened to derail my whole day. It was one of those times when an attempt to knock off a few easy tasks backfires because one thing after another goes badly until it seems like each failure is feeding off the one before it.
The head of a screw breaking off is annoying but the steel tines of a bedding fork snapping at the handle was uncalled for.
I switched to something with less risk of failure. Beyond shredding the flesh of my forearms on tangles of bramble, the hauling away of the piles of vines we have been extracting the last few weeks was the beginning of a trend of success for me. In addition to the vines, while we were in that mode of hauling, we accomplished a couple more loads of piles of branches that litter our woods.
Eventually, it became time to crank up the riding mower to conquer some of the lawn grass that has been doubling in height by the day lately. We won’t be participating in any no-mow-May campaigns this year. My mowing started in April.
Cyndie thought the mowing tracks in the grass were worth a picture.
I was pleased with my ability to minimize muddy skidding in wet areas on my first time operating the zero-turn in many months.
Today, I hope to tackle the labyrinth with the push mower in preparation for World Labyrinth Day on Saturday. It will depend on the 50% chance of rain being forecast. Timing is everything. If I had mowed too many days before the event, the grass is growing so fast this time of year that it would be longer than we want.
The grass in the pastures is already getting beyond the rate of the horses’ grazing, and they are spending most of their time out there. Granted, I spotted a fair amount of napping going on on the high slope of the hay field, so not all their time out there is being spent gobbling grass blades.
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Mostly Rain
Amid a heavily broadcast series of warnings about the chances of severe weather, I dawdled indoors much of yesterday until time was dwindling in a break between bouts of precipitation. It felt like now or never to get anything productive accomplished outside.
I gassed up the power trimmer and went after as many easy targets as I could hit, with particular interest in two of the most needed places. I reached the strip of longest grass just beyond the culvert as the sky began to grow dark again. It wasn’t pretty, but as raindrops started falling, I finished what I had set out to do.
The area of that strip is now a sloppy mess of long, wet cuttings, but it is a cut sloppy mess. If I’d had time before more rain, I would have used a pitchfork to pick up the mass of wet chopped grass left behind.
Earlier in the day while it was raining, I spent a little time perusing old newspapers for ancestor names again. Focusing on the River Falls Journal in the latter half of the 1800s, I found a treasure in 1878 under “Local News” for Esdaile. It lists the names of “pupils who excelled in their respective classes in the first month of the winter half of the present term.”
My search term was, “Hays” so it was easy to spot my great-granduncles, George and Charles Hays. Those two are the younger brothers of my great-grandfather, John W. He would have been 17 years old at the time. Charles was 9 and George was 8.
What made this find such a treasure was the name of one other excellent student: Minnie Church.
Minnie is my great-grandmother. She was 10 years old that winter when the grades were published. I would imagine the younger three knew each other well, spending their school years together. Ten years later, in 1888, Minnie and John (seven years her senior) were married in Minneapolis.
I wonder how the younger brothers felt about John getting the girl in the end.
Discovering those records was a lot of fun for a mostly rainy day.
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Growth Control
Between the days when it has been raining lately, the mowing hasn’t been simple. The saturated ground makes navigating the heavy riding mower on the many slopes around our property a rather inelegant science. The hardest part is not knowing I’ve driven myself into trouble until I’m already in it.
A glance behind me reveals muddy tracks and then forward momentum slows as the tires start to spin. Even though there are areas where I know there is standing water to be avoided, it’s not always obvious how much of a buffer around them I need to maintain.
The bottom line becomes getting the tall grass knocked down as a priority and accepting there will be a few sacrifices made to the turf in the process. The final result is a much less satisfying mowing experience than the days later in summer when the ground isn’t so wet.
Yesterday, I decided to use the string trimmer to clean up some areas where the tractor didn’t dare go. Then I trimmed around culverts, under fence lines, around downspouts, and along walls. Having those areas cleaned up provided a visual reward that compensated for the ugly skid marks and muddy tire tracks that resulted from needing to control the growth happening at its fastest while the ground was still extremely wet.
I’m coming to terms with the reality that early-season mowing often won’t look pretty around here but the fast-growing grass will be knocked down often enough that it never gets completely out of control.
Heck, even the horses can’t keep up with grazing their pastures this time of year.
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Our Day
A day after we celebrated Julian’s birthday with a family dinner at a Bloomington restaurant, Cyndie and I claimed yesterday for ourselves in honor of our 41st wedding anniversary. Our animal sitter, Grace, was on the calendar to free us up to do whatever we wanted. In the end, we both wanted to stay home and work on our property.
I am thrilled that our first accomplishment involved clearing small stumps, roots, and rocks in our north loop trail that have prevented me from being able to mow that section as low as desired for our walking trails. I’ve been wanting to take care of this nuisance issue for two summers.
In the afternoon, we focused our attention on the labyrinth. I brought down our new favorite tool, the electric push mower to give it a fresh cut.
We rearranged rocks and pulled weeds, addressing only a fraction of the total that is deserving of attention. The progress looks so good it has us both wanting to get back down there again soon to continue the beautification.
Just as we were about worn out for the day, we looked up to find the horses had wandered back to hang out in our proximity. That was all the invitation we needed to stop what we were doing to go hang out with them.
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Throughout the day we reminisced about our wedding day back in 1981, an outdoor service on a day with very similar weather to what we were enjoying yesterday. I remember the trees were starting to turn colors, similar to what is beginning to happen here this week.
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Cutting Pasture
It feels like I have been cutting grass non-stop for days. I used to think that growth slowed to a crawl after August but I saw a chart at the State Fair this year that indicated grass growth in September can be compared to what happens in June. There is a slump in July and August when grass might even go dormant before reenergizing in September.
It used to confuse me that September was a recommended time to seed new grass but now I can understand why that is.
Our land is still overly dry but we have had just enough rainfall between dry spells that the greenery looks pretty lush and the grass seems as happy as can be. The reason it feels like I’ve been doing a lot of mowing is that I have been playing with our new electric push mower, and I cut grass in the labyrinth, then used the brush cutter pulled by the diesel tractor to mow the hay field, and yesterday, the back pasture.
In addition, I have been cutting beneath the fence lines with the power trimmer. On top of that, I knocked off the second phase of a twice-a-year mowing of the drainage ditch along our southern property line.
When it’s dry, the mowed ditch becomes an alternate trail for Delilah to explore. In that image, she has her nose to the ground exploring any animal trails hidden beneath the mass of cuttings. The months of growth in the ditch were four to five feet tall and it is a blind cut on the first pass. My foot is poised to hit the clutch to interrupt the power to the mower if anything that wasn’t supposed to be mowed is encountered.
I back up the full length with the brush cutter tipped up a bit and then lower it for the return trip in the forward direction toward where I started. It isn’t a straightforward simple cut because there are washouts where fast-moving water has eroded the soil and they meander back and forth so the tractor wheels occasionally drop down or the mower bottoms out as travel progresses.
So, it is a blind cut on a completely unpredictable terrain. It is a great relief when that task has been fully accomplished.
It is also extremely satisfying to have both big fields mowed. If you’ll recall, it isn’t so much the grass that we need to cut as much as the weeds we want to prevent from going to seed. Cyndie and I don’t want to use toxic chemicals so mowing is our chosen method of control. We also pull a lot of weeds but that is similar to trying to empty a lake of its water by removing a spoonful at a time. Although, it is very satisfying, psychologically, to yank a weed out by its roots.
The horses took great interest in my activity in the back pasture and gave me the impression they wished I would hurry up and finish so they could get back on it.
I’ll keep the gates closed for a couple of days to dry out the cuttings and give the grass a little time to sprout new growth before giving them access again. Meanwhile, they have the entire already-mowed hay field at their disposal.
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Caught Up
For a day or two now, we are caught up with mowing all that is growing at the peak rate typical for June. Yesterday was a perfect day for cutting grass with the lawn tractor. It was dry with a nice breeze and the grass wasn’t overgrown. I was able to mow at high speed, there were no piles of clippings, and the finish looks top notch. I will enjoy it for the rarity it was because I regularly find myself facing one or multiple versions of cutting complications.
Cyndie raked the clippings in the labyrinth after giving them a day to dry out and it is looking its best, as well. Did I mention that, after a good night’s sleep, Cyndie was feeling back to her healthy old self?
I tried wearing my earbuds under the earmuff hearing protection I wear while mowing because I am caught up in a Kris Kristofferson song from 1976 that I just heard for the first time. I’m contemplating trying to memorize it so I can create my own version to play and sing.
“There ain’t nothing sweeter than naked emotions
So you show me yours hon and I’ll show you mine”
I heard Shannon McNally’s version first and then searched for the song origins and found both Kristofferson’s and Willie Nelson’s two versions. It amazes me that I haven’t come across this song sooner in the 46-years since it was written.
All credit goes to MPR’s “Radio Heartland” on the HD2 subchannel of KNOW’s 91.1 MHz. I rarely pursue music beyond my personal library collection anymore, so exposure to new music is mostly limited to what I hear on the radio when traveling in my car. My tastes have begun to age out of MPR’s “The Current” at 89.3 MHz FM so more and more I find myself migrating to the primarily acoustic, singer-songwriter, folk, and Americana offerings on “Heartland.”
“And I wish that I was the answer to all of your questions
Lord knows I know you wish you were the answer to mine”
I am enjoying that this song has finally caught up with me after all these years.
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Trimming Minutiae
There is no drama about our activities yesterday and little in the way of specific goals. The hours passed as the earth rotated and shadows moved while Cyndie and I toiled on a variety of rewarding tasks.
I made the dreaded trip to buy gas for all our small engines and the diesel tractor. Ouch. That’s a burden on the pocketbook.
One way I reframe the harsh rise of the cost of fuel is to remember the time we had been shopping for a while and Cyndie grabbed a 20 oz. bottle of Aquafina water at the checkout counter. It added the paltry amount of $1.68 to our over $500 bill at Lowe’s. It was a purchase of convenience, for sure.
That price for 20 ounces of water is equal to $10.75/gallon. Think about that.
With all gas cans full, I was able to resume using the power trimmer. I had completed all our fence lines over the weekend so the next crucial need was the labyrinth. It didn’t give in without a fight. The stones defining the pathway wreak havoc on the nylon line of the power trimmer.
One technique I attempt to employ to reduce the abrasion of the line against the rocks is reducing the speed of rotation. Maximum speed is not required to achieve an adequate cut. Still, the spinning will deplete line and require the bounce against the ground to advance more length. I can’t count how many times I would release more line and almost immediately the trimmer would catch an edge and torque right up to a rock and eat the new line I just bounced out. Aaarrrrgh.
Just when things are going smooth, the engine runs out of gas. At least I was wise enough to bring the can of gas along this time. I also had a spare spool of line with me, just in case. I needed to use both.
The challenge always seems to be coming out even in completing the intended cutting goal before running out of either line or fuel. When I finished the pathway of the labyrinth, I moved on to the firepit next to the labyrinth, as long as I still had both line and gas. After finishing that, I decided to hit the trail in the woods for as long as the trimmer would run.
It lasted a lot longer than I expected. I cleared a large section of the perimeter trail where the grass had gotten very tall. A bonus accomplishment I didn’t anticipate achieving.
After too many days in a row of trimming for hours, my throttle hand was letting me know it had had enough. That’s a good reason to stop using that tool for a while. Today my hands will be on the lawn tractor steering wheel.
We are in the month of never ending mowing, which is putting the job of never ending sawing and wood chipping on temporary hold.
Somewhere between those two, I keep intending to add never ending bike rides, but that keeps failing to happen.
Could someone slow down the earth’s rotation a little bit, please?
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That Close
I knew I might not finish trimming the grass along the fence line before the gas ran out but the closer I got, the more I hoped I might make it. My decision to leave the plastic gas can behind probably doomed my chances of not needing it.
There were one and a half lengths between posts left to cut out of the entire distance of our fencing when the motor sputtered out on me. Nothing to do but walk back to the shop garage and bring the gas can back with me.
We haven’t always been proactive about trimming the grass along the fence before it gets problematically tall, especially during the time when there were no horses on the property and we didn’t need the electricity activated. When the fence is electrified, contact with the growth around it puts a load on the circuit that pulls down the voltage.
The first time I used the power trimmer along the fence line, there were several areas where woodier stems of some plants would break the plastic cutting line. This time, around the entire length of our fences, I did not run into anything that the plastic line couldn’t cut. It was very rewarding to discover that we’ve been cutting it enough times now that there is no longer anything robust trying to grow under there.
It fits with what I was writing yesterday in that the job of keeping the growth off the fence is getting easier to manage over time. It would be just fine with me if eventually, nothing tried to grow beneath the fences and I didn’t need to cut it anymore.
I could intentionally neglect it. 🙂
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Relative Something 