All of the lawn was mowed at the same time! And it was trimmed. It took Brandon nearly all day on Sunday, working on and off at it. He keeps expanding the area he mows, and even has a few places we refer to as auxiliary yards - near the road, under the zip-line, behind the hammock. Plus the nature trail that wiggles it's way around the property boundaries and animal fences.
Because the chickens will dig up any mulch that we use, most of my little fruit trees and other trees I'm encouraging to grow do not have a ring of mulch around the base to suppress the weeds. This means the tall grass at the trunk of the tree gets trimmed with the weed-eater, and the base of the tree gets nicked and scarred. I worry that this will kill the trees, but I don't worry about it enough to take on trimming them by hand. Hopefully the repeated abuse will create a super tough bark scar that can withstand the whipping string trimmer.
The iris are blooming!
We've also begun moving the soggy bales of straw from around the house foundation to the garden to use as mulch. Those bales are so heavy! Before we placed the straw bales to block the breeze from entering under the house through the gaps in the foundation rocks, I read someone's advice on the interweb, and they said cleaning up the bales of straw was such a big job they would never do it again. Now I know what they are talking about! Brandon estimates that each bale weighs over three hundred pounds. It's a soggy bundle that's hard to maneuver onto the dolly, and the weight causes the dolly wheels to sink into the soft earth. Also, the siding behind the bales turned green with algae. I think this will be encouragement for us to chink the foundation before the next winter. Our pipes never froze this winter, so at least the straw worked.
In the background of this photo you can see some of the rose bushes that we transplanted from a friends landscaping. They are red "knock-out" roses, which I think I've seen around hotels and restaurants. They didn't have much dirt on their roots when we picked them up, and had been out of the ground for more than a day by the time we got them planted.
The roses were wilted, so I trimmed them back by more than half, and after nearly a week in the ground, I'm starting to see some life in most of them. We planted roses in the front of the house, the workshop, and the studio building, so if we ever do get red flowers, they should be very visible from the approach to the house. I hope it's worth putting thorns in our yard!
It seems that it rains nearly every weekend lately, but Sunday was a perfect spring day. Cool but dry and sunny. We mowed, trimmed, gardened, and even hung all the towels out on the line to dry. We are getting excited for the annual firefly festival farm party, and made a list of things we would like to accomplish before the big day. I think any spare time we have next weekend will be dedicated to the pool. It's almost pool time!
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