Posts Tagged ‘mowing weeds’
Extremely Dry
It feels like our spell of extremely dry conditions has caused some plants to end their growing phase a little early in the season. A few of the sumac leaves are losing their green color and turning red already.
The trails in the woods are opening back up as leaves and stems are starting to wither. The trees that drop their leaves early have started to cover the ground with shriveled and twisted brown leaves.
Even though the hay field was hardly lush with growing grass, it was greatly in need of being mowed to knock down Queen Anne’s Lace and a variety of other bothersome weeds and tree sprouts threatening to take over. Cyndie looked up suggestions for improving our field and learned that the most effective thing we can do, if we are intent on avoiding chemical spraying, is to mow it regularly.
I dread mowing the 5-acre hay field with our relatively small brush cutter because it takes so dang long. I spent over 4 hours making pass after pass on it Friday. It was also frustrating to see how many times the tall weeds simply lay flat under the tires as they rolled by, so that the rotating blade passed right over them without cutting.
The horses didn’t seem to care.
From a distance, the field looks pretty nice. It could probably fool a passerby into thinking I used a finishing mower instead of the brush cutter with a really dull blade.
While I was stuck on the tractor seat for hours on end, I watched Cyndie using the string trimmer to cut beneath the fence line. Boy, does she work fast. It made my slog back and forth in tight little lines feel like it was taking even longer.
I failed to notice her getting stung in the ankle multiple times by a wasp. When I got back to the house, she had her foot propped up and was icing it.
Asher added a little of his own excitement as we were headed down to feed the horses later in the afternoon. I noticed him intently focused on a spot under a pine tree, just staring. When I looked back a second time and found him still frozen in the same position, I had a good sense of what was coming next.
Sure enough, he reared up and pounced, driving his snout into the dusty, dry soil with two quick paw-swipes and came up with a mole. What always follows is a protracted pacing around the property for the perfect place to bury his catch. He looked so lost that I commanded him to come bury it behind the barn, where we could keep an eye on him. He deemed that an acceptable option.
A few minutes later, he was back in the barn, regally reclining like the great and successful hunter that he is.
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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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Relative Something 