Posts Tagged ‘mowing’
Readjustment Required
Four days away was enough to cause a bit of anxiety for Asher upon our return. He seemed happy to see us but he also showed signs of being less confident in himself upon readjusting to the differences in our routine as compared to the sitter’s. I’m guessing Mom and Dad are a little more strict about how things should go and Asher wasn’t quite ready for a return to that.
Tuesday night he spent more time whining in his crate than he did sleeping. Unfortunately, that meant Cyndie and I didn’t get the sleep we wanted, either. Asher rallied yesterday and showed his best self during a visit to the veterinarian for a checkup and some shots. The after-effects lasted a few hours during which he laid low and napped but then all of a sudden he was back to his old self and playing with his usual vigor.
I wish I recovered that quickly when I got my last shots.
The pup officially weighed in at 70 pounds. I’ll take that. It’s ten lbs. less than the unofficial weight we’d been given by the foster mom.
I’m curious to see how he does today in session three of our obedience training class. We are expecting the barriers between dogs to be pulled back which will mean many more distractions during the lessons.
When we got home from the lake on Tuesday, the labyrinth was first on the list for mowing.
The prolonged dry spell hasn’t slowed growth everywhere, particularly in our poison ivy patches. Some areas of lawn grass are turning brown but most others are just growing with less robust energy. Yesterday, I focused on mowing just the areas that grew the most.
I need to readjust to this sudden onset of hot summer weather. It’s the first day of June and we are getting mid-July heat and humidity. It has me wondering what it will be like when we get to July.
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Messy Mistake
There is a reason I turn off the electric fence when I mow. Yesterday, I demonstrated precisely what that reason is. When we walked around the back pasture in the morning, the ground was so saturated it was obvious I wouldn’t be able to mow along the fence line there. With more rain expected in the morning, I figured I wouldn’t be cutting grass anywhere, despite it growing so fast lately it needs to be mowed every couple of days.
That rain never fell. By lunchtime, it was starting to get sunny out so I figured I better do some mowing. It was mesmerizing. The new battery-powered zero-turn was making great progress with plenty of juice to spare. I headed out around the back pasture without thinking. That was a mistake.
By the time I was reminded of the saturated ground, I couldn’t turn out of it. I wasn’t able to back up and got stuck against the wire fence. To extricate the mower I needed to get some boards and a jack from the shop. I lifted up the front so I could point the wheels away from the fence and set them down on top of the boards. That almost worked but the rear wheels were still stuck spinning in their own divots.
Another trip back to the shop for more boards to shove beneath the rear wheels got me away from the fence and free to spin my way along until I reached dryer ground. I came back later with a push mower and finished cutting that section by hand.
The biggest victory of the day was that I didn’t beat myself up over getting into the mess in the first place.
I am loving my new mower but I have a long way to go toward controlling it well enough to stay out of trouble and stop making skid marks when I turn around on slopes. If the ground would get a chance to dry out, that might help. So, maybe July?
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Just in case anyone was wondering, today is my sister, Mary’s birthday.
Happy Birthday, Marebare! 🙂
[It being her birthday has nothing to do with Messy or a Mistake. That was all on me.]
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Stormy Weather
The day started reasonably enough yesterday. The ground is still pretty saturated, but I decided to give it half a day before trying to mow some of the areas that are most in need. Despite my decision to mow our grassy areas in April and May (as in not doing No-Mow-May), we aren’t entirely shortchanging the pollinating insects of wild blossoms.
The dandelions are all over our pastures and the horses are absolutely thriving on the access we’ve finally given them to graze to their hearts’ desire.
After lunch, I hopped on the zero-turn mower and tried tackling a few tricky spots. I give my performance a C-minus, but a significant portion of that low grade comes from the ground still being almost un-mow-ably wet. It doesn’t help that I’ve yet to master driving without excessively spinning a rear wheel as I try to maneuver.
An embarrassing number of muddy skids are present in almost all of the areas I tried to mow. Luckily, the grass will recover, the ground will eventually get dryer, and I will get better at driving with practice. The getting dryer part will probably take longer than the other two.
Last night as we were eating dinner and watching the PBS Newshour, the weather alert tones interrupted the show with a tornado warning for our county and a community just east of us. That was an unexpected surprise. The sky didn’t look the least bit threatening out our windows at the time. I immediately brought up a view of the weather radar on my laptop. Sure enough, there was one little spot of intense-looking weather happening very close, off to our east.
As time passed, that one spot slid south and morphed in a way that started to wrap around us. At that point, the skies did turn more ominously dark and big raindrops started to fall. I kept refreshing the radar view and saw new cells popping up all around us.
The best part of the whole night of stormy weather was the fact that Asher never paid any attention to what was going on outside. Our previous dog, Delilah would have started barking at the invisible monster before Cyndie or I heard the first rumble of thunder and she would have kept it up despite every trick we tried to calm her. The fact that Asher is not similarly bothered by thunder and lightning is bringing us immeasurable appreciation and satisfaction.
Almost makes me not care that he can’t be trusted to stay off our bed and the kitchen counters yet.
He does bark when someone shows up at the door but not at thunderstorms.
Perfect. Good dog, Asher.
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Playing Balls
Not just one ball. Asher was holding one ball in his mouth while kicking another one around like he was in a game of soccer. I think he would be pretty good at futsal. The video below has a quality problem between 18-28 seconds. I apologize for my inability to solve the glitch. It plays fine on my computer but something must be failing during the upload.
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I am thrilled that Asher can catch almost every throw I send his way, that is when he doesn’t have another ball already clenched in his jaws. We are going to have a lot of fun sporting around together.
Yesterday afternoon, I let go of his leash and let it drag in the grass as we killed some time in the backyard. I’m happy to see that he is showing promising signs of not being a flight risk when outside without being tethered. We will get a little bolder about experimenting with him once his identification tag arrives. If he takes off for one of our neighbor’s properties, we don’t want him to have the appearance of being a stray.
We’ve only had him here since Monday, so he won’t be familiar to folks around here yet.
Some of them may have heard a new bark resonating in our valley. We think we’ve discovered a trigger that upsets him. He doesn’t like being tied on a short leash. Even though we were near him, he yelped until we fixed the situation. He was more satisfied being loose in the house and watching us through the windows than finding himself tied near us outside.
I got the labyrinth mowed using the push mower and also did some other cutting with the new zero-turn mower. Navigating slopes did not go well for me. I need to start cutting differently than I used to.
The landscape is ready for World Labyrinth Day tomorrow (Saturday). Cyndie will be baking treats today in preparation. The only thing left to make it a perfect day is out of our control: The weather. Hopefully, the 50/50 chance of precipitation will be in our favor until later in the afternoon.
While mowing the pathway of our north loop trail, I came upon a pheasant standing fully exposed in broad daylight. He calmly walked away from me as the tractor approached him for about 5-10 yards before turning and heading into the brush for cover.
I learned it is impossible to take a hand off one of the steering levers to take a picture while the mower is still rolling along. Playing ball with Asher is much easier for me than steering a zero-turn mower.
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Rock Up
When I was mowing the back pasture a couple of days ago, I was startled by what almost sounded like a gunshot when the brush cutter struck I rock that I didn’t know was there. In pure reaction mode, my foot hits the clutch as my right-hand grabs the lever to lift the mower.
I hopped down off the tractor and checked everything over, then walked off to grab a step-in stake to mark the hazard. With the blades looking no worse for the wear, I resumed the pasture cutting and finished without further interruption.
Yesterday, I grabbed a shovel and a pry bar to bring the troublemaker up out of the ground, not yet knowing if it would even be possible. All that was visible was the freshly nicked tip of a proverbial iceberg. What could be lurking beneath the surface might be so large it would require a backhoe to dig out.
Luckily, that wasn’t the case and I was able to employ my solo technique of bringing large rocks up to the surface where I can scoop them up in the loader for relocation.
While the horses grazed nearby, I began probing to find the edges of the rock. Relieved that the borders seemed reasonable, I began shoveling scoopfuls around the perimeter until I got deep enough to use the pry bar to get some movement of the rock.
It’s a slow but completely effective process of tipping the rock enough to shove dirt under it. At first, it seems ineffective but after enough iterations, the progress speeds up. Alternating back and forth on opposite sides of the rock, I pry it up and shove the dirt previously removed to fill the small gaps that open up.
If I had a time-lapse recording it would look like the rock “rocks” back and forth, gaining a little height each time.
The white portion is what the brush cutter chipped off. The darker portion around it is the area that was above the surface. The rest was the mystery encased in dirt.
It looks suspiciously shaped as if it had been formed at some time for a particular purpose but I have no idea why it was buried out in the middle of an open field if that was the case.
Now I am left with a significant void on the surface of the pasture. Before I come out to retrieve the rock with the loader bucket on the tractor I will need to fill the bucket with some replacement soil. Now, where will I find some natural fill around this place?
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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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Dew Drenched
You know, I could get a lot more mowing done in a day if I didn’t need to wait so many precious hours for the grass to dry out from the overnight soaking of dew.
On the other hand, the wet hours during the first half of the days lately have given me a chance to knock off a few other miscellaneous chores that otherwise get passed over for the larger jobs.
I finally took a wheelbarrow into the woods to pick up a big pile of half-buried landscape fabric that had been dumped years before by previous owners. I discovered a piece of it several years ago in a most unsuspecting place off a trail, pulled up what seemed like an endless amount and then walked past it over and over through the seasons ever since, always thinking, “I should haul that out of here one of these days.”
Well, now it’s been hauled. Dew is not a bug, it’s a feature!
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Home Fields
As we rolled up the driveway on Saturday after Cyndie picked me up upon my return to the Cities, I asked her to stop at the barn. I wanted to let the horses know I had returned home. The unpacking of wet things could wait a few more minutes.
Swings greeted me first from her spot against the fence rail under the overhang. She breathed in the scent of my hands and lifted her head to let me scratch her neck. It feels pretty special to have developed a relationship with these horses after all that they have been through. I moved from Swings to Light and then to Mia. The chestnuts had each waited patiently on the other side of the overhang space. They breathed in my scent and accepted a few scratches
Finally, I looked to Mix who had yet to approach. She stepped up to the gate when I looked toward her. The herd welcomed me home.
Home to our fields. Cyndie took the above picture while I was away. The horse is standing in the back pasture. Beyond the fence is the hay field and it looks very different today. Yesterday the field got cut by a neighbor who will be taking it as round bales for his cows. It looks pretty good freshly cut. I’ll have to take some pictures.
Cyndie was in that spot to capture the grazing horse because she was taking pictures of the limb that had broken off one of the old maple trees near the back pasture.
It’s nice to be home but it means I have to get to work using the chainsaw first thing. After I finish mowing, that is.
Something tells me I’m not on vacation anymore.
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Looking Good
I’m in the final countdown of days before leaving tomorrow for my annual vacation week of biking and camping with the Tour of Minnesota. I feel reasonably prepared, both mentally and physically. Yesterday, we worked on a few projects with immediate visual rewards on the landscape around our house and on our north loop trail to get everything looking good before I go.
We received notification from our county that it was time to have our septic system inspected and yesterday the tank was pumped and deemed to be in good working order. That’s always a relief to know. Cyndie and I mustered the initiative to use the occasion to clean up the overgrowth in our drain field.
I was reminded of our visit to Ian’s place in Portugal in 2010 when he and I cleared the bramble that had covered a spring he hadn’t seen in years. I uncovered an old tree stump that I had forgotten was there when we cleaned up the crazy tangle of things growing among the wild raspberry bushes since the last time we cut back the growth there.
After that was done I got out the diesel tractor and mowed down the thistle and poison ivy as well as the edges of our north loop trail. If I somehow avoid getting a rash after the wild thrashing of so much of the troublesome ivy it will be a big surprise to me.
Next, we spent time trimming branches near our backyard fire pit. I started with a pole saw that proved entirely inadequate and ultimately brought out the pole chainsaw and the big chainsaw to clear all that looked deserving. It is always interesting to discover there are more things to cut than we originally expected. Once you get in there and take out the first layer, the next obvious candidates suddenly pop into view.
While I had the main chainsaw out, I finally dispatched the last dying pine tree that was in the middle of the back yard.
Cyndie captured the shot just as the tree was falling. There is only one dying pine tree left back there now. It is on the side of the yard and doesn’t stand out as obviously so it can linger a while longer. We have already got enough branches to clean up after all the cutting that was accomplished yesterday.
Today, I will mow the grass with the lawn tractor to get this place looking its best before I leave Cyndie to deal with everything for a week.
That should be completed with plenty of time to spare for packing my things before Saturday’s departure. Despite having done this June week of biking and camping more than twenty times before, I still struggle with the decision making about what I really need to bring.
At this point, it sounds like the week is going to start out hot. That should make it easier to pack light.
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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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Relative Something 