Ending and Beginning

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.

DW planted most of the herbs (plus one tomato) she started from seed in the bed outside the back door.

Today is another gorgeous Spring day. I have a bad cold, which detracts a bit from my enjoyment of it, but I’ve still managed to get a couple of things done.

Did some more hand-mowing (some with the help of the boys), and dug clippings into part of the garden.

Set up a new 4′ x 4′ bed for one of the vining squash. Put down several thicknesses of newspaper to kill the grass, then soil from garden, then a layer of fresh green grass clippings, then another layer of soil from the garden. I’ll add more soil in 2 or 3 weeks, then plant. That will give the squash room to vine across the lawn. The soil in that Southwest corner of the yard is very rich, so they should do well.

You can see two of the small fruit trees we planted last fall in the above photo. I have, alas, forgotten if we bought two plum and one pear or two pear and one plum. At any rate, it looks like they all came through the winter fine and are getting ready to leaf out in the next week.

My perception of our yard is changing. I used to think of it in terms of a nice, largish suburban yard (even though we’re not really in a suburb), an asset in terms of property valuation. Now I think more and more that this is the last place I will live, and so the value of the yard to anyone else becomes irrelevant.

Our yard has become a place to grow food and support our family in other ways in the coming [insert doomish adjective of your choice here] times. It’s appearance doesn’t matter. It’s a working yard now.

All that’s good.

Delila, champion mouser, was out enjoying the weather also:

Finished the fence around the garden today. Came in at around 210′.

Mowed some long grass with the non-motorized mower. Raked up the grass clippings and dug them into the garden where we’re going to put the corn and some of the tomatoes.

Dug up more quackgrass.

DW planted 3 rhubarb crowns along the South property fence near the East end.