Posts Tagged ‘mowing’
Unlikely Plan
It seemed like an unlikely plan, but somehow I pulled it off. After a short errand to River Falls in the morning, I felt overcome by sleep when I got home. A 45-minute period of deep slumber in the recliner followed. I did not wake full of zest and pondered the possibility of illness brewing within.
The hour of lunching had arrived, so I decided to try fueling my body to see if that helped me feel more alive. I asked Cyndie if it seemed dry enough outside to mow after our overnight rainfall watered all the growing things. Her answer was rather noncommittal, but it wasn’t a no.
It had gotten late enough in the day that it was entirely uncharacteristic of me to start a project like mowing the back pasture with the diesel tractor and brush cutter, but that is what I decided to do. I hadn’t used the New Holland 3415 since mid-April, so I checked the oil, added air to the tires, added liquid grease to the brush cutter gearbox, and greased the universal joint. For good measure, I got under the brush cutter and used the grinder to touch up the cutting edge of the blades.
By the time I got in the field, it was almost 4:00, but I didn’t let it bother me. My intuition was telling me I could make worthy progress, and if I couldn’t finish by a reasonable time, it didn’t really matter.
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Well, I did finish. It was about 6:00 when I stopped the tractor in front of the garage to blow it off with compressed air.
When I first rolled into the field, the grass looked to be a little wetter than I expected, but not enough to be a problem. It actually seemed to get drier as I went along. This is the earliest in the summer that we have mowed the back pasture. We always waited in the past because we anticipated it would get cut for hay along with the front field, but the guy doesn’t want to bother with the short distances back there.
Now that we know that, there is no reason to wait. It was an easier job to cut it before it got too tall, and the sooner we nip the weeds, the better. And, gosh darn, it just looks so sharp freshly mowed. I don’t know if the horses are as thrilled with it as I am, but how can they not like it?
Probably the most exciting for me is that I succeeded in pulling off such an unlikely plan for my comfort level in getting things done. I credit the nap. I think it might be my new superpower.
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Mostly Minutiae
What if one day I completely ran out of ideas? Would I write about that? Probably. Good thing I can fall back on simply describing the minutiae of my days. Like how I started the already too-hot day early in the morning yesterday, trying to get manure management back to my high standards after our long weekend away at the lake.
After breakfast, I wanted to use the riding mower to harvest our crop of too-tall grass, but the overtemp error code came on the instant I turned the key. The blade motor had worked a week ago when I mowed the backyard, but now, after sitting dormant while we were away, it tripped before even starting. Doesn’t make much sense, unless it’s reacting to air temperature.
Thankfully, I picked up the replacement motor yesterday, although not until after I pushed the hand mower for a few hours to completely exhaust myself first. The afternoon became a precision-planned exercise of errands I stacked together for maximum efficiency. A stop at our eyeglass place to have them snug up the fit on my new prescription safety glasses. The trip up to North St. Paul to pick up the motor from a repair shop certified to work on Greenworks mowers. A run to my bike shop to get a front light for my bike. A stop at a taphouse in Woodbury for a kick-off meeting for planning my class’s 50th reunion next summer. And finally, a stop to pay over $4/Gallon for gas on the way home.
The timing worked perfectly. Had time to spare, actually.
I’m hoping today will end up just as smooth. We have HVAC installers coming to add ductwork and a dehumidifier in our furnace room. I want to make the motor swap first thing in the morning, in case I can get some additional mowing done before our new Swedish friends stop by to see our place.
I truly hope the dehumidifier installation can be completed in one day. Cyndie has company coming tomorrow, too. I need to get the labyrinth mowed before then. I wish I were better acclimated to 80° F days already. Working outside in the hot sun felt brutal yesterday. Last night, when I checked the 10-day forecast, there wasn’t a day when the high was less than 80.
That gives me an idea. We should just stay at the lake all summer long.
What a wonderful thought. Since that is just a fantasy, I don’t have to bother figuring out how the grass would get mowed, and the animals cared for at home. I can just focus on how that massive air-conditioning body of water beats the heat.
I think I’ll dream about that today while sweating on the riding mower or trudging behind the push mower.
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Rewarding Things
As I was making progress with the string trimmer along the fence line yesterday morning, I had the thought that it’s one of the most rewarding things to see the fence freshly trimmed.
On my walk back toward the shop, I found Mia and Mix lying down while napping in the tall grass of the hay field. Light was doing the same thing inside the large paddock fence. I thought, one of the most rewarding things is, seeing the horses feeling so safe and content and lying down together.
Before I started packing for the lake, the backyard needed mowing. The dandelions were getting as tall as small trees. Not wanting to leave the mower deck all weekend without being cleaned, I parked the mower on two planks so I could scrape the accumulated grass clippings off the bottom of the deck the moment I finished. It led to the thought that it’s one of the most rewarding things to so easily scrape the deck clean while the gunk is fresh and damp.
We then packed the car, left Asher and the horses in the care of our friend, John, and headed to Hudson for the “Taste of the Valley.”
It was a beautiful night for a picnic. We enjoyed repeated rewards of flavors and textures. It was almost impossible to keep track of how much we’d eaten. Cyndie and I shared a lot of bites with each other.
The most rewarding thing came at the end of the day, as we arrived at the lake just after sunset and successfully avoided colliding with any wildlife when driving during the hours of low visibility. Still, we spotted one black bear in a distant field and one deer grazing precariously close to the road.
We stayed up late to watch Stephen Colbert’s last Late Show. Poor CBS. The broadcast company has become a shameful shadow of its former self. It’s been rewarding seeing how many people of good character have voiced their support of Stephen Colbert, and that his popularity has only grown since it was announced that CBS had canceled his show.
It was a good end to a very rewarding day.
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Good Boi
For the record, I mowed the entire backyard yesterday and didn’t trip a single error code. Right now, I’m inclined to think that is because I have already placed an order for a replacement motor.
I wrote last Tuesday that we had lost the controller for Asher’s e-collar for a few days. He ended up spending some time back on leash and some time free to roam near the house while we were in the vicinity. Now that we have returned to his normal routine, he has been behaving exceptionally well.
When we’ve lost sight of him for a long enough time to seem concerning, we’ve been finding him parked outside a barn door or up in the front yard, calmly keeping watch over his kingdom.
Yesterday, he seemed particularly comfortable staying in the front yard, regardless of what I was doing. Choosing to leave him be, I snuck around behind the shop, planning to make my way to the end of the driveway to retrieve the empty trash bin.
When I got to the road and checked the mailbox, I spotted Asher at the top of the first rise near our rocking chairs on the lookout spot along the driveway. He was well aware of my movements and came up to a spot where he could keep an eye on me, without showing a need to come all the way to the road. I liked that.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had been using the string trimmer and stopped off to rest beside him when I was done. I hadn’t even noticed how much debris was sticking to my pants until I sat down with him. It didn’t seem to bother him one bit, as he decided to use my knee as a pillow as long as I was there.
These kinds of days are so much more pleasant than the ones where he decides to sprint off-property and get a mile up the road before I catch him.
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Pushing Abilities
One moment of losing focus on the task at hand can have unwelcome consequences. I took a blow to the leg when I least expected it; a smack hard enough to bruise bone and break the skin. No, it wasn’t while using the chainsaw, nor the string trimmer or hedge trimmer. I stubbed my leg against one of the rocks along the front of our fireplace.
Is this why running in the house is frowned upon? I was fully engaged in Asher’s favorite indoor pastime of pursuing him and the toy in his mouth as he ran laps around the spiral staircase and the furniture in the living room.
The game came to a screaming halt, with the screaming coming from me as I wailed over the sudden crippling pain. Cyndie worried I’d seriously injured myself, not having a clue what had caused my outburst. I worried I might never walk again.
Okay, that is an unnecessary exaggeration. Some quick first-aid in the form of an ice pack from Cyndie and elevation had me back functional in about 30 minutes. The extent of the wound serves as an indication of just how fast I can get moving on two feet, so I see it as a badge of my athletic prowess. Still, I wasn’t fast enough to catch Asher.
The bruised leg didn’t prevent me from making some impressive progress on pushing the abilities of my Greenworks riding mower to mow along the fence line from inside the pastures.
It’s asking a lot from the machine to cut such tall, thick grass where the surface is dramatically uneven with divots from horse hooves, piles of dirt from gophers, and some unavoidable piles of manure. The effort is compounded by the occasional plugging of the mower exit chute and the fully understandable interruption of the PTO when a blade motor over-temp sensor is tripped.
I learned from a Greenworks support technician that a blade of grass can get up inside a gap along the spindle to cause the error that trips the sensor and shuts down the blades. The only time that has been a problem for me is when I try mowing where the grass is too much for this mower, so it’s not the machine’s fault.
Since I now know how to solve the issue, it’s not that concerning, and I find myself more willing to push the machine beyond its limits. I stumbled a little bit the first time it happened yesterday because I was getting a second error code that had me walking back to the shop to charge a battery in hopes of limping the mower back to the garage. Reviewing the manual for error codes alerted me that I hadn’t reset the PTO button to “off” after the blade motor sensor tripped.
The mower won’t start with the PTO in the “on” position. D’oh!
As soon as I resolved all the issues, I was back in business. It worked so well the rest of the way, I continued to mow pasture away from the fence. The area around the round pen is a hassle to navigate with the diesel tractor and brush hog, so the more I can do with the little riding mower, the better.
It’s as impressive as heck that the Greenworks zero-turn riding mower is up to handling everything I push it to do.
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Labyrinth Day 2026
Never mind that the first Saturday in May is when the Kentucky Derby is run every year; this is also the day when labyrinth walkers the world over walk as one at 1:00 (in each of their respective time zones) to meditate on peace, creating a wave of energy that circles the globe.
I gave the lanes of our labyrinth a final mow yesterday and then steered the riding mower along all of the grass walking paths around our property. We’ll spend this morning tending to last-minute details and then become greeters for potentially a record crowd for Labyrinth Day on our property.
The labyrinth is looking as good as we could make it this time of year. The main thing missing is leaves on bushes and trees, and flower blossoms on plants that bloom. Early May is too early in the growing season to do our property justice, but folks will get the gist of how special this place is.
Cyndie is expecting quite a few people who have never been here before. We are looking forward to sharing the glory of our paradise with newcomers. I asked Cyndie if we should close off the hay field to limit the horses to the back pasture near the labyrinth. We decided that they are so beautiful to watch out front that we’d let them continue to have full run of their territory.
Do you think our horses are aware that the big “Run for the Roses” race happens in Kentucky today? That world is a long time ago in their lives. They might have a sense that other horses are running, but I’m pretty sure they are fully submersed in their lives of retirement, which has absolutely nothing to do with track racing.
At one o’clock this afternoon, all minds will be focused on world peace. I suspect the horses will be picking that signal up loud and clear.
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Spring Growing
The new green growth of spring is ramping up to top speed around here. The thing about mowing the grass is that the saturated ground is not solid enough to support the riding mower in most places. I almost buried the back wheels by pushing my luck in the ditch beside the driveway that I knew would be a risk.
Every time I make this mistake, I ask myself why I can’t keep from testing the inevitable. Just don’t. But then I do.
It’s such an affront to my sensibilities when certain areas of regular mowing are neglected and stand tall, looking hideous, while the surrounding grass has been freshly trimmed. You’d think it would be easy for me not to care, but my true lawn vanity seeps out in the end.
One place where the super-wet ground is making spring growth very happy is the willow tree in the small paddock that is supposed to be dead.
I’ve never before seen such a dead tree look so happy to be alive. Doesn’t make any sense to me. The horses continue to gnaw on the wood as if they are intent on making it disappear. It can’t continue like this indefinitely, but I am becoming fascinated by how big the new growth on top will get before the end finally arrives.
Moving indoors with the subject of new growth, our repotting of the ZZ plant got me thinking about our Bird of Paradise, so I sought out a picture of what it looked like when it first arrived from Elysa and Ande.
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Look how many new leaves have sprouted on that in the 20 months it’s been here. It’s reaching for the sunlight, but we are hesitant to turn it because the tallest leaves are being supported by the cabinet. The main trunk leans enough that we fear it will topple over without support.
This afternoon, I hope to mow the grass along the driveway and the road. Tomorrow, I will mow the labyrinth. Even with so many trees, bushes, and ground cover growing rapidly, there are plenty of things that barely have buds yet. It leaves so much of the splendor of our spaces far short of its ultimate lush glory.
It has me thinking we should create an event of similar attraction all our own, later in the growing season. A Labyrinth of Love walk, maybe. All we would need to do is find a weekend in the summer when we aren’t away at the lake. Is that a thing?
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Good Life
We woke yesterday morning with a glee hangover from our amazing David Byrne show Monday night, and it lingered throughout the day. Blessed with a fabulous climate-warmed summery-feeling November morning, we danced our way through the woods with Asher before approaching the barn to feed the horses.
We found the mares luxuriating in the emerging sunlight and mellow as ever. It got me thinking about how they stand so stoically to endure the miserable conditions when the weather is gruesome, as if they are aware that it never lasts, and that there will eventually be rewarding days like this as compensation.
Lately, mornings as nice as this one was –when the horses are calmly munching their feed and the natural world is as peaceful as ever– serve as a balm, soothing and comforting us. Coming on the heels of our evening of super special entertainment, it felt like we were getting a double dose of feel-good medicine.
Asher seemed to be enjoying the unusually nice weather as well, and it had him romping playfully all over the place. When I decided to try raking some leaves, he behaved like I was making piles for him to race through and kick all over the place.
For what I hope is the last time this year (never say never), I got out the riding mower to mulch the leaves in the backyard grass. Most of the trees that drop leaves have finished doing that, so it seemed like a reasonable time to finish tending to the grass in back.
When I put the mower back in the garage, I moved the ATV to the front and parked the mower behind it, a symbolic gesture in anticipation of the change from mowing season to snowplowing season.
After that, I started picking off little nuisance tasks that had been nagging at me for a while. I drove my car to the shop garage to put air in the tires. Then I brought our three most-used wheelbarrows up from the barn to inflate tires on those. I attached a recently purchased battery manager to the diesel tractor battery. It instantly kicked into “charging” mode. That tractor doesn’t get driven enough to keep the battery charged.
Cyndie cleaned and mended horse blankets. I moved a fresh batch of hay bales from the shed into the barn. We moved her picnic “door table” and chairs from beneath the big oak tree in the woods into the barn for winter storage.
Working outdoors felt like we’d been given a gift to accomplish all these things on such a pleasant weather day. With all of our animals showing irrepressible joy and contentment, it felt like we were living the (really) good life.
If only I could train my brain to retain the sense of this goodness with more weight than it does with the challenging days of harsh weather and difficult problems, I would be ever so grateful. That would be living an even better life.
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It’s Starting
In September, the shortening of days becomes more noticeable. The temperature swings between morning and afternoon force clothing adjustments from jackets to shirt sleeves. Tree leaves begin to reveal that their growing season is coming to an end.
The tops of some of our trees are starting to show some orange. Cyndie has set our thermostat to “Auto” to cool the house if the daytime gets too warm and bring heat when the nights get too chilly. Schools are in session, and fall sports are underway.
Advertisers peddling goods via Christmas themes won’t be far behind.
I experimented with relaxing my perfectionistic tendencies yesterday in order to get enough mowing done to feel like our place is ready for us to be gone for a week. The grass remained damp enough that it was difficult to get a grip with the riding mower’s tires.
It didn’t feel like I had time to carefully navigate sideways slopes, so there was a fair amount of failure to keep the free-spinning front wheels of the zero-turn from uncontrolled turns downhill. It was a haphazard, frequently circular route to getting all the grass blades trimmed.
The wet soil and slippery grass resulted in a far greater occurrence of spinning wheels when I simply wanted to execute a turn. Normally, this causes me a lot of angst and a fair amount of foul language, and inspires me to try many ways to prevent it from happening. Not yesterday, though.
I chose the alternative of not caring in an effort to accomplish the greater goal of having the whole place mowed before we leave. I’m the only one who will even notice the increased number of skid marks.
It’s September. People’s attention will be on the trees, not on the dirt marks in our grass.
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Picking Battles
The backlog of things we would like done on our property is more than we can realistically accomplish on any given day, so we step out the door with vague intentions and see what claims our attention first. The driving factor is either how fast things are growing or what tree or branch has fallen and needs to be cut up and processed.
We also need to react to whatever the weather brings and adjust our agenda accordingly. Yesterday, the wildfire smoke was annoying, and the high dew point temperature made things a sweaty mess, but since there was no rain, we chose to cut and trim mid-summer growth.
Cyndie took the battery-powered string trimmer down to the labyrinth, and I headed for the north loop trail with the hedge trimmer and a rake.
My goal was to create a smooth wall of foliage along the trail marking the northern edge of our property. There is a rusty old barbed wire fence just inside all that growth.
I think it looks better as a hedge wall.
While I was working, I received a call from Cyndie. She needed my help with the trimmer because the line broke off inside the spool. I told her I would be right down.
When I got to the labyrinth, she wasn’t there. I called her back, and she told me she had gone up to the shop.
If there are two different ways to do something, we will always choose the opposite of one another.
As the afternoon wore on, I finished mowing down by the road and around the house. I found Cyndie disassembling our broken kitchen compost bin so we could put the pieces in the trash before it gets picked up this morning. A replacement bin is on order.
I finished trimming along the north loop trail and mowed along the edge of several trails. They will all need to be raked as a result. This time of year, if we don’t deal with the rampant growth along the sides of our trails, tall weeds, and grasses droop over and almost make the pathways impassable.
At one point during the hot afternoon, I caught a glimpse of the horses hanging out under the shade sail. That was one of the highlights of my day.
Today, I get to choose between mowing the labyrinth, trimming under the fence line around the back pasture, using the hedge trimmer on the last length of the north loop trail, using the string trimmer on the trails through the woods, or using the chainsaw to cut up the large limb of the oak tree that is still laying across one of our trails.
If I don’t feel like picking any of those, I could always rake the clippings off the trails where I mowed the edges yesterday. With how fast everything grows, if we don’t tend to some part of it every day, it just gets harder to keep up with the groundskeeping tasks.
It seems like a lot of work –and it is– but it’s a labor of LOVE!
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Relative Something 