Posts Tagged ‘mowing’
Scary Moment
If I haven’t already ranted enough about how long the grass had grown at home while we were up north for ten days over the Independence Day holiday, let me add one last exclamation point. After I completed a second round of mowing, there were still enough leftover grass clippings to rake into windrows for making yard bales.
While I was playing around in that small plot above the barn, I heard some knocking on one of the horse’s feed buckets. We try to bring the buckets in after the horses have finished their grain, but I had left one out because there was a portion uneaten, and Mia was showing interest in it. If we leave the buckets indefinitely, the horses have a history of messing with them, and the metal handles get all bent out of shape.
After three knocks, I decided I better retrieve that last bucket before it gets wrecked. To my surprise, when I stepped through the door to the overhang, I saw it was Swings who was knocking the bucket in the spot where Mix usually eats, and she was standing with one foot in it.
Thankfully, she appeared totally calm with the situation, but at the same time, in a somewhat precarious position. Concerned that things could quickly take a turn for the worse, I bent down to assist her in getting out of this predicament. I reached through the fence boards and grabbed the sides of the bucket with each hand to hold it down, hoping she would then simply lift her foot out.
It didn’t work that way. I couldn’t tell if she didn’t want to pull it out or couldn’t pull it out. I got the impression her hoof might be wedged in the bottom, but it wasn’t clear since I couldn’t tell if she was pulling up or pushing down. The bucket was moving around and eventually pinned my gloved hand against the fence board hard enough that I began to bellow at the pain as Swings appeared to try standing on the hanging bucket with all her weight.
It was a scary moment. In my increasing panic, I tried to determine what was going to give. The bucket needed to be lifted upward to come out of the latch on the strap it was hanging from. I had no way to cut the strap in that instant. The metal handle looked like it was bending a bit, but the heavy plastic bucket wasn’t looking near its breaking point. It pretty much depended on what Swings was going to do next.
Luckily, she still seemed totally calm about the mess we were in, even with my screaming. Somehow, she shifted just enough that I was able to get my hand free, and it seemed undamaged. The residual tenderness of the bruise didn’t show up until later. Just as mysteriously, the two of us did something that allowed me to finally pull the bucket down while she moved to get her hoof out.
I don’t know how she got her foot in there in the first place, and if it was intended or not, but it occurred to me that she might have been unable to lift it high enough again to get it out. I’m still not clear about whether it was wedged in or if it was just her not taking the weight off that kept it stuck.
Thank goodness for the happy ending. I was home alone at the time, so that heightened my distress during the peak drama. And hooray for the other three horses remaining chill throughout it all. Once Swings had all four feet back on the ground and I was standing there holding the mildly reshaped bucket, it was as if they were all thinking, “What was all the fuss about?”
Nothing to see here. Carry on with your normal healthy horse routines. I’m going to go back to raking up grass clippings.
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First Pass
We had a blast yesterday morning connecting with people currently living in the area who share a history of growing up in old Eden Prairie. It is reassuring to find there are like-minded folks who are actively working to make life better locally. I liked it when one of them said his contributions to helping people around here were a way to get back at the current President, who is constantly busy making things worse all over.
Amen.
When we got home, I hopped on the mower, hoping to complete a first pass cutting all the spaces that needed mowing by the end of the third day.
Conditions were ideal, but the exceptionally long grass necessitated a change in tactics, resulting in everything taking longer than normal. Some of the finished results were not pretty, but at least it looks better than not being mowed at all.
I decided to work late in order to finish the last of the mowing for this first pass of the long, long grass we faced on our return from a 10-day stay at the lake. Why do I always save the labyrinth for last? Now I can start the whole place over again, cutting reasonably long grass this time.
Working late down at the labyrinth brings an additional challenge, as the mosquitoes were becoming active in the shade, and apparently, I made for an appetizing target.
When I finished mowing, I stepped into the woods to check out the downed oak limb that Cyndie has been “nibbling” away at with the hand chainsaw.
It’s made it much easier to see what I’m going to be up against when I get around to cutting it up with the big chainsaw. You could say that Cyndie has made the first pass on the oak limb.
I think I’m going to let the tree cutting wait until I’ve finished using the hedge trimmer along the sides of pathways and the string trimmer along the fence lines.
There will be no rest for the weary during the growing season.
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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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Coping Nicely
While Asher, Cyndie, and I are able to take refuge from the extremely hot weather by retreating to the air-conditioned house, the horses must endure the blast furnace nonstop until it abates. In the same way that they stand stoically against the worst of winter’s cold, they find ways to make it through the worst of the muggy heat.
It’s a bit shocking to me that I didn’t find them the least bit ill-tempered when I showed up to serve their afternoon grains.
Later, when I arrived to retrieve the feed buckets, all four of them were out grazing in the back pasture. I thought it was weird that they were standing in the direct sunlight, as the heat had yet to loosen its grip.
One second later, Swings and Light had returned to the shade of the paddock. Out in the field, Mix and Mia were a picturesque pair. As I had my back turned, dumping a load of manure into a compost pile, Mix and Mia returned, as well.
It was a shock to step out into the open and find them standing right in front of me. It’s as if they use teleportation to cross that distance in such a short time. One moment, they are stationary with their heads down in the grass, and an instant later, they are calmly standing in the paddock before me, not even breathing heavily.
When Cyndie was out with Asher on his last walk of the evening, she found the horses mingling around in the vicinity of the shade sail, even though the sun was low enough that trees were shading the whole area. They have given every impression they are coping with the oppressive conditions nicely.
The last few rain threats have missed Wintervale, leaving us pretty dry. Cyndie spent a fair amount of time last night watering all the flowers she has planted around the house landscape. It would be great if we could get rain today and tomorrow, but not on Wednesday or Thursday.
We leave for the lake on Friday and will be gone for ten days, so I would really like to cut the grass one more time right before we go. I’ve got a routine established now with the electric riding mower that I can cover the entire property on three charges over two days.
You could say I’m coping nicely with the rampant growth that is occurring this time of year.
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Days Away
I’m leaving today for a few days of camping and cycling, which will serve well as a warmup to the week-long Tour of Minnesota ride coming in mid-June. This time of year, a few days away from growing grass can be an issue, so I took some extra steps yesterday to address places that don’t receive regular attention.
Cyndie asked me to clean up our trails, which meant I would be using the string trimmers.
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Between fuel refills for the power trimmer, we decided to park the water tank in the ATV trailer behind the rocking chairs on the lookout hill. Cyndie has planted grass seed on the bare spot in front of the rockers. To get the Grizzly ATV out, I needed to move the riding mower. As long as I had that out, I decided to do a quick mowing of the round pen. We like to keep that turf closely cropped, and the horses aren’t thorough enough with their grazing in there to stay ahead of it all.
Since I had the riding mower inside the pasture fence, I figured I may as well make one pass along the inside of all the fence lines to minimize the amount of trimming that still needs to happen beneath the wires. For some reason, mowing inside the fences is something I usually wait too long to do. It feels good to have done it before the grass got too tall for the mower to handle. It makes the trimming so much simpler, you’d think I would make this a higher priority.
With all these non-standard mowing steps accomplished, I’m feeling okay about sneaking away for a few days of biking. I expect my posts for the rest of the week will be more rudimentary since I plan to leave my laptop at home and will be using my cell phone for all my communication.
Hopefully, the battery pack I have will be up to the task of keeping my phone charged. I’ll be charged simply by living in the great outdoors and riding my bike for multiple days in a row.
Maybe I should think about packing my gear in the dwindling few hours left before my scheduled departure…
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Not Panicking
Just because my pet maple tree that we transplanted to the middle of the labyrinth hasn’t sprouted leaves yet, while almost every other tree around has, we’ve chosen not to panic. New buds are visible, but they just haven’t made as much progress as we expect at this point. There are a small number of other trees of a variety of species that are similarly delayed compared to the majority of broadleaved trees and bushes around here, so there is that. It’s not alone.
Since we have been enduring a long span of hot, dry, sunny days, our cool-headed response to the situation was to put a watering bag around the trunk to keep the little guy well-hydrated. We are hoping to see visible progress of advancing leaf buds soon.
I had another opportunity to not panic yesterday afternoon while mowing. As my confidence and control on the zero-turn riding mower have improved, I find myself pushing beyond some of my previous boundaries. I’ve started mowing a half-swath beside some of our pathways with the deck at the highest setting to control the walkway narrowing from tall grass on the sides bending over into the lane.
Cutting it back with the riding mower is a great improvement over my previous effort of walking along and swinging the hedge trimmer blades across the too-tall grasses after the fact. That is laborious, back-aching work.
While making a first pass along the edge of our path around the back pasture and hay field, the front wheels suddenly jumped, and the mower deck bottomed out on a tall mound. The mower was pointed down into a bunch of scrub brush trees along the drainage swale. With the deck stuck on the mound, the drive wheels had no grip on the ground. I couldn’t move forward or reverse.
I do believe my years of experience were revealed in a complete lack of cursing and tantruming. I simply walked all the way back to the shop and got the ATV and a come-along. After a couple of futile tries, I realized I needed Cyndie’s help. I pulled out my phone to call her and found she had texted me.
“We’re walking off leash & see you on ATV- need help?”
Since she has never operated the zero-turn, I offered her the ATV, and I spun the wheels on the mower. Nope. No progress, but I had a hunch.
I asked her to try the mower, and I got on the ATV. The throttle just needed to be goosed with a little more oomph, and we pulled it right off that mound.
When success comes without having put myself through the angst of getting overly upset at the outset, the reward of solving the dilemma is that much sweeter.
It pays not to panic.
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Between Showers
We received rain in several waves that lived up to the weather forecast for yesterday. Despite the precipitation, we pulled off a few good projects on our to-do list for this week. First off, the horses had a morning appointment with the farrier.
Heather reported a significant amount of growth in hooves since her last visit. The horses were reasonably well-behaved throughout each of their trimmings. Mix was unnecessarily fussy about the confinement we forced on her for all of an hour and a half, but stood well when that was required for Heather to do her thing. The herd returned to calm as soon as halters were removed and gates all reopened. They didn’t waste much time getting back out on the fresh grass.
For my next project, I decided to set up under the hay shed roof to cut some blocks of wood for the shade sail posts going into the ground.
The plan is to screw these blocks onto the 6×6 posts to add a ledge that will resist forces pushing upwards. I decided to get fancy and cut angles in the bottom side of each block so there won’t be a flat surface to push against from below. Since these blocks will overlap on one end all the way around the square, I made one additional cut at a compound angle to mate the slant of the adjacent block.
Go ahead and try to picture that in your head, if you can figure it out. It was all rather experimental for me, having no experience with this level of carpentry. I’m understandably chuffed that I achieved the result I was after and only needed to cut one extra block due to a mistake.
For reasons that escape me, the horses came back to the paddocks and hung around nearby as I worked. You’d think the repeating loud buzzing sound of the saw starting and stopping would drive them off, but it was just the opposite. It made me happy to have them linger in the vicinity while I was in production mode.
When I was finished with that project, I looked at the radar and saw that time was limited until the next batch of rain. I decided to take a crack at mowing the labyrinth between showers.
I made it all the way through the labyrinth and cut a lot of the surrounding area before it started to sprinkle again. It was light enough rain that I was able to keep mowing until I finished everything I wanted cut.
For the first time in several years, we are expecting a dry, sunny day for World Labyrinth Day tomorrow. We are not in the best climate zone to show off our Forest Garden Labyrinth in early May, but we make due. It’s a little like having a flower show without any flowers. That doesn’t mean a person can’t enjoy taking a meandering stroll down the curving path while meditating on global peace, but it would be that much more inspiring to have leaves on the branches and flowers on stems.
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Clock’s Ticking
We are quickly running out of time to accomplish any of our goals that require an ability to see clearly into our woods. Leaves and flowers are about to burst forth like a volcanic eruption.
Grass is growing enough already that I did a little mowing with the push mower in front of Cyndie’s perennial garden and the sunny spot behind the barn that always grows faster than anywhere else on our property.
While I was tending to compost piles mid-morning, I looked up and found three of the horses on the ground napping with Light standing watch.
I finished the afternoon with a shift clearing out downed branches that have accumulated in the area where we recently pulled out a few miles of grape vines. All the time I spent in there battling vines revealed just how many branches were on the ground.
We keep going back and forth over wanting to pick up dead wood that falls or leaving it to decay. We soon discovered it’s a fool’s errand to think we could stay ahead of the number of branches that are constantly dropping. The problem is that ignoring the situation for very long gives the place a neglected look and makes the clean-up job much more work when we finally decide to do it.
I made piles that must now be hauled away from the lane around the back-pasture fence. Anything dry can be run through the chipper, but the rest will be tossed onto the natural fence wall where we just piled all the willow branches we cut down on Monday.
If we don’t move all these branches today, I worry we will get distracted by other projects. Suddenly, the piles will be swallowed by grasses and brambles, and we won’t see them again for a year.
We are on the verge of a green growth explosion. If we listen closely, I think we could hear leaves unfolding all around us.
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Missed Spot
I did a lot of mowing yesterday and took the batteries of the riding mower right down to the limit. Like so many gas tanks and their gauges, the second half-tank of fuel seems to run out a lot faster than the first. I run for a surprising amount of time before the indicator on the e-mower changes from 100% to 99. When I hit the 40s, I might miss glancing to find a number in the 30s. Suddenly it’s 20-something and then I can almost watch it tick down one percentage after another.
I was hoping to finish one particular section before pausing to charge the batteries so I started accelerating my maneuvers to get to the end. By skipping two finishing passes that I could do later, I cut the essential area and limped the tractor back to the garage on battery fumes.
By switching to the push mower and its fully charged batteries, I mowed the labyrinth while the riding mower’s batteries charged. Just over an hour later, I was back on the riding mower and cutting down by the road. As the shadows were getting longer, I finished along the driveway and was ready to call it done. I don’t know how I suddenly remembered those two passes I’d skipped earlier but I realized it just in time to wheel over to the back of the barn and reach the completion of a big day of mowing.
While at the barn, I hopped off to bring in empty feed buckets and tend to some manure clean-up. I spotted something as I pushed the wheelbarrow out the back door.
There was a sprout of uncut grass a little bigger than my footprint that I had missed. It brought a laugh because this was in a spot I had been mowing well before I had hastened my progress due to low batteries.
Describing to Cyndie what I found humorous about the oddity, I told her, “It looked like the way Cyndie mows!”
For those unfamiliar with our myriad differences of thought and behavior, I am very methodical about my mowing routine, whereas Cyndie is inclined to employ a much more creative way of getting the job done.
Vive la différence.
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Relative Something 