We’ve had a lot of rain and showers lately, enough that it’s been hard to get outside work done, especially work in the garden. It’s time to plant pretty much everything, plus the lawn grass is getting really long.
Mowed the lawn with the power mower for the first time today. Maintaining a grass lawn sucks, no doubt about it. It’s a big time and personal energy sink, plus gas mowers use fossil fuels and are, from what I’ve read, significant polluters. (We’re thinking about getting one of those push electric mowers to replace our old gas mower. MEN had an article on them recently.)
I’d rather do something manually, but I don’t know what. A scythe? Maybe, but probably not.
We do want to maintain some lawn as a play area for the boys. If you just stop mowing, you get shrubs and elms growing in there before long, as has happened in the unmowed NE corner of our property. So what to do?
- Get an electric mower to reduce fossil fuel use and pollution.
- Continue to mow grass that is not too long or thick with the unpowered mower. That’s a better option after the flush of growth in the Spring.
- Further reduce the area being mowed.
- Maintain unmowed areas as hay fields — don’t let woody plants get started.
- Reclaim current unmowed areas as hay fields by removing brush and trees.
- Figure out how to cut hay manually — try to find a scythe for cheap and learn how to use it. CR probably has one I could borrow.
Here’s one of the showers that missed us, passing to the North.
Ending and Beginning 
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