Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Yard Work

For the past month and a half, Anke has had me out in the yard doing Yard Work every weekend. I had no idea that owning a house would entail quite so much of the stuff. First shoveling snow and now this.

To help with the job, I picked up a Craftsman racing mower from sears. It has a 6 3/4 pound feet of torque Briggs & Stratton engine. Big directional tri-spoke wheels. And a parachute on the back to help me slow down. On top of all that, it's menacing black, with a fire red engine cover. Maurice may have a faster car than me, but my mower smokes his. One thing that does confuse me is that I can't find the rabbit and turtle to control the throttle.

See those bushes behind me? They used to be huge. Anke thought that they were too huge, and had me wack them down to nearly nothing. She says they'll come back bigger and better than ever. All I know is that it was a lot more work than I wanted to do. And now I have a big patch of dirt that used to be covered by bush.

Notice how tall the grass is here? That is in my swampy area that nearly never dries off. At some point I'm going to have to do something about that, like a French drain. Or something. But my racing mower took care of that 8 inch wet grass like it was nothin'. Torque bitch!

Here is the obligatory picture of Corwin trying to help out. He loves water and therefor he loves the water hose. He's also getting taller and talkier.

Anke has also had me planting plants galore. Two rose bushes. Two currant bushes. Transplanted a blue berry bush. Weeding, weeding, weeding. Ripping out Virginia creeper and a couple of poison ivy vines by the root. The yard really did need a lot of work. Since the house was unoccupied last summer, the yard was a bit neglected. We also planted two bamboo plants, one of which is shown. I'm actually excited about the bamboo. They are small now, but they should reach around 6 or 7 feet in height. The bamboo photo was taken with my new phone. It isn't quite camera quality and very far from our DSLR, but it's much better than my old phone.

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