Posts Tagged ‘wet ground’
More Wet
This may be the legacy of our summer of 2024: wet and more wet. It probably will be overshadowed by Joe Biden’s announcement of bowing out of the 2024 campaign for President and Kamala Harris rising to take over the cause boosted by an impressive groundswell of support. Compared to that, our water-logged trails, sloppy paddocks, and fast-growing plant life will likely become barely a footnote.
It was mostly dry when we got home yesterday afternoon. The puddle that we like to call, “Paddock Lake” near the bottom of the larger of our two paddocks was just a little muddy in the middle and the drying edges were already cracking. The one-and-a-half inches of water in the rain gauge explains the standing water in the tractor tire tracks in the hay field where 14 large round bales were transferred out on Friday.
The fact that the excess water in the paddocks appeared to be quickly drying offered some hope that we may be reaching that point of the summer when the ground is able to absorb the rain as fast as it falls. That might work if the rain didn’t keep falling again and again as if it was still the month of April.
Shortly after dinner last night, our weather apps began to ping messages of impending rain and warnings about lightning.
We received a good soaking. Whatever had started to dry out yesterday was freshly wetted again.
I’ll be wearing my wet boots to walk Asher and tend to the horses this morning.
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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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Relatively Damp
Am I prone to understatement? Not always. Sometimes I go to the other extreme. My natural inclination is to be contrarian, so instead of titling this post, “Soaking !#@$ Wet,” I settled on a genteel descriptor for current conditions. The ground around here is actually wetter than an entirely saturated sponge this morning.
I’m sure the trees are soaking this up with glee. Buds are sprouting from every stem and branch and noticeably increasing the hues of green emerging by the day.
Yesterday’s World Labyrinth Day event brought ten visitors to Wintervale, six of whom are family, four friends, plus a small dog. After some stutter-starts at the meeting of dogs, Asher settled into a wonderful acceptance of all the activity, people, and the one pet unfamiliar to him in his new home. All signs continue to hint that we will find success soon in Asher developing into the pet we are hoping he will become for us.
As long as he refrains from putting his nose on the kitchen counter, then his paws, and reaching for an unfinished scone on a plate, or shredding the cover of the pad in his crate, or getting back up on the living room couch again, or failing to recognize we are speaking to him and directing commands his way for compliance.
He appears to be relatively willing to suppress his natural instincts and behave exactly as we desire at all times.
Hah!
Yeah, we got this.
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Yes Mow
While I firmly agree with the philosophy of “No Mow May,” for our labyrinth, yesterday was Yes-Mow-April. Even though there was one area that remained surprisingly saturated to the point of being ill-advised, the rest was good and held up well to the inaugural cut of the season.
This is the first time we have been in a position where we could get ahead of the growth before it got out of control and that feels wonderful. The labyrinth is looking the best it has ever looked at this time of year and is just lacking the growth of new shoots and fresh leaves on all the plants to reach its most impressive appearance.
As long as I was doing some mowing, I couldn’t help pulling out my newest addition to our battery-powered landscape management tools, the zero-turn mower. I had already driven the mower around enough to realize it would take me some time to master the nuances of operating the independent drive wheels by separate levers but I had yet to actually cut any grass with it.
I should probably make a sign for the mower that says, “Student Driver.”
Navigation in close quarters, say, along the wall of the barn or beside a fence, is fraught with uncertainty. My hasty reactions to correct my heading tends to be wrong, leading to hapless attempts to counter the mistake with overcorrections that exacerbate the misdirection. Holding anything close to a straight path is a worthy victory for me. It will take time to figure out how the 360° rotation of the front wheels ends up contributing to my difficulty in maneuvering.
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There are some new skid marks in the turf where I struggled to turn around on a slope where the earth beneath the grass was soft and wet. That’s a cost I must bear for being too eager to cut before the ground is truly dry. This year I just seem uncharacteristically eager to get the first mowing done before the grass gets overly tall.
Future occasions will only get better as I gain experience and the ground becomes more firm. At the rate this spring weather is struggling to pull away from winter, firmer ground may not happen for many weeks. I may rely on the trusty push mower to do much of the cutting while the soil beneath the turf remains more like Jello® than normal dirt.
Or, I could simply adhere to the directives of “No Mow May.”
Naaaaah.
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Relative Something 