Jul 18th, 2018

Author: donich_admin

Mowing the lawn

As I may have mentioned before, we have 3.5 acres of garden, surrounded by the Donich Water to the right and rear, with forest to the left and a rough track leading to the house at the front. Thankfully, not all of it is laid out to grass, but about an acre of it is – and with all the sun we have had and occasional rain, everything is growing at a great rate. We have a petrol mower with drive assist for going up hill as most of our lawn is on a slope and it has a “mulching plug” (sounds rude!) so that the grass is chopped up finely and you don’t have to rake it up. Only trouble is that if you let it get too long – the plug can’t cope and you have to use a bag which then means you have to empty it about 100 times.

Well last night I realized that if I didn’t do something soon it would be bag time – so I went off to do it (I say it is a man job, but R says it is good exercise for me). What hard work it was, as it was so long in places that the motor on the mower was stuttering and I had to literally force it along.

I felt bad about killing the thousands of wild flowers that were growing there, but it is more a question of “resurgam” as they seem to come back remarkably quickly. Suddenly I noticed movement in the grass ahead, but it was too late to stop and I was sure I had killed something, I turned back to look and there was a miniature toad waddling along quite unhurt. He must have been too small for the blades to hit him. I took him and put him in our pond which is sadly lacking in water at the moment.