First Mowing of the Year

The yard was telling me it was time. The neighbors had not openly complained about the dandelions, but I would not be surprised to hear that they were secretly planning to spray my yard with a weed killer. The mower started just fine, I had my cheap plastic bags out, and I was able to get the majority of the yard cut in about a half-hour. Here's the thing I hate about what the mower revealed. The neighbors all either spend a lot of hours fertilizing with weed-and-feed type fertilizers or they pay Company X to come spray their yards. Inevitably, they have nice, verdant green grass. I have what can more closely be described as hay, except that any horse with half a brain would never eat it because of the high weed content. That is, there's hay where I didn't pile up the stacks of leaves that I raked off my driveway at the end of last fall. There is no grass there. I am not sure how I feel about that. Where there was grass, there was at least the vibrant yellow of dandelions and the royal purple of wild violets. The way it looks now, it's cleary not going to win any awards from the local beautification council. At least before, it might have been able to garner some admiration from the environmental types.

My reward: I finished as it was getting dark so I could not see the quality of my work nor look for the bolt that fell out of the handle. The bolt screws into a large wingnut so as to hold the top part of the handle to the lower part. Maybe it will show up tomorrow - I hate looking for stuff like that at Home Depot.