reclaiming ground

Outer yard progress: more reclaimed

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

My plans to continue mowing and, hopefully, reclaiming more overgrown areas nice and early got delayed a bit. We had an unusually heavy dew this morning, and cooler temperatures kept it from evaporating until well into the afternoon.

However, progress was made!

Remember this area?

I hiked up the lawnmower, and was able to clear the area all the way to the storage building around behind the pump shack that’s in the photo.

Eventually, I will continue on beyond this, making access to the back gate, but for today, I focused on the area around the maples.

The last time any of this area was NOT overgrown was when the renter’s cows discovered his electric fence wasn’t working, and broke through.

Two years ago.

By the time they finished grazing, the entire outer yard looked awesome! :-D

When I was a kid, the fence to the inner yard at this location was on the other side of the maple trees. There was a small gate near the pump shack, for when we went to get water for the house, or took baths with water heated on a wood burning cookstove that used to be in there. When the chain link fence was installed, it was done in a straight line, rather than turning a corner to include the trees.

I miss having a gate there!

I had to be really careful working through here. I’ve tried to keep up on removing any fallen branches over the past couple of years, but knew there had to be more, hidden in the tall grass. Plus, who knows what else would show up.

Like the lone brick I found, half buried in the dirt.

Thankfully, raising the lawnmower meant I didn’t hit many of the larger buried branches, like the one in the photo above, that I pulled out of the thatch.

It’s only a start. We’ll have to go through the area to clear out any other branches and whatnot that is still buried in there, prune back the trees (there is now lilac growing in the space we used to walk through to get to the pump shack), and get in there with a weed trimmer. Some of the trees have fence wire around them, though one of them is just a stump that has some suckers growing out of it. Since we don’t have to protect the trees from cows, I want to clear away the wire, and salvage it for something else.

I’ve been wanting to get into this area for the last two summers! It feels so good to finally start cleaning it up. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Reclaiming space

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Well, it’s a good thing I was planning on using the push mower more.

While using the riding mower in the inner yard today, I stopped at one point, to go over to talk to my daughter, who was using the push mower. When I returned to the riding mower, it started just fine, but wouldn’t move. !! There were no issues at all before. One minute, it was working fine. The next, no go. Forward or reverse.

Well, we were planning to take it in for Maintenance next month, anyhow…

After doing most of the inner yard, I switched to cutting the outer yard, as there was so much of it that hasn’t been done at all this year. I quickly stopped using the bag to collect grass clippings. It filled so quickly, and the mower just doesn’t like to restart very well.

That did mean I was able to reclaim more areas of the outer yard.

For the first time since we’ve moved here, I was able to clear the area in front of this old shed.

Do you see where the colour changes from nice and green, to more brown?

While the clippings blur the line a bit, there is a clear demarcation where the colour changes. The brown is where I had not been able to mow, until today. Where I’d been able to mow for the past couple of years, the grass is green, thick and healthy. Where I hadn’t been able to get in with the riding mower (and it’s so rough, I still won’t be able to use it there), the grass was choked out by its own thatch.

I’ve now been able to reclaim pretty much all of the outer yard on this side, and I’ve started to reclaim the area leading to the collapsing log house and chicken coop.

I feel like I should have been making hay! The grass was starting to go to seed.

I will work on this area tomorrow, weather willing. With the push mower, I’ll be able to reclaim even more of the outer yard, little by little. I’ll be mowing a path to the other gate, as before, but will have to be very careful as I go beyond what I’d been able to do with the riding mower. Who knows what is hiding in that tall grass! Rocks and rough ground is one thing, but there could be chunks of wood, metal and small kitchen appliances, for all we can tell.

Since I was walking back and forth so much, I took advantage of it and opened up Pokemon Go on my phone. There is a feature in the game where you have a “buddy” Pokemon that walks with you. While it is your buddy, the game records distance, even when the game is not active. After you walk a certain number of kilometers, your buddy “finds” a candy.

The buddy I have right now is a Meltan. While most buddies need to be walked for 2, 5 or 10 km before finding a candy, Meltan needs to be walked for 20km. Once a candy is found, the meter restarts for the next 20km.

Based on the distance measured in the game, I walked at least 12 km this afternoon. And that doesn’t count the distance this morning.

My phone came with one of those “health” apps that I can turn off, but can’t get rid of. These apps irritate me, since they all basically measure “health” as “lose weight”. It doesn’t matter how good your other health measures are, or how much exercise you get, if you haven’t lost weight, you’re a failure. It does, however, have a pedometer. I’m curious to know just how many kilometers I am actually walking while doing basic yard work.

The Re-Farmer