“Landscaping” at Curmudgeon Compound isn’t really landscaping. Nothing was ever graded, or seeded, or really anything. (Putting down sod would be hilarious out here!)
My “lawn” is basically cow pasture that was mowed on and off for several decades after the cows were gone. It’s a de facto lawn. There has never been a single thought put into anything other than dragging a mower over it.
Since moving here I’ve “lost ground” on some sports but other spots I reclaimed from literal cows. (I pulled down temporary electric fence and in a few instances “discovered” stealth hunks of barbed wire when it wrapped around my mower deck.)
Nature is not wimpy. You gotta’ keep up the fight! If you don’t mow at least a few times every year all hell breaks loose. If the rain is sufficient it’ll go to chest high weeds in one season. It’ll be tree saplings and shoddy ill kempt forest in ten.
The thing is, anyone can manage a 1/5 acre suburban lot but land is hard work. (Though I don’t have huge tracts of land.)
It’s precious space. It’s a firebreak and “working area”. Working area means “whatever isn’t appropriate for indoors”. For many years I had free range chickens (and a corral of pigs). Last year I “camped” there. When I plow snow the “lawn” accumulates mountains of the stuff. You have to stack wood and gut deer and have bonfires and park dead trucks somewhere.
If you don’t have a lawn, where does the dog shit?
The last few years things degraded from “shabby” to “emergent wilderness”. I allocate resources as best I can and health came first. I barely managed to keep the grass hacked down. Though last fall I did do some firewood cutting and that made me happy. I even cleaned up some trees that had windblown on the lawn (though a few downed trees are still moldering along the edges).
This year I’m starting to “turn the boat around”. I mow with a tractor so “trimmed lawn” ain’t a thing. It’s a 3 point hitch, I can only be so accurate.
Years ago I cleaned up the yard with a weed whacker; just like a civilized person. I decided to do that again.
I dug through my garage and found two gas weed whackers. One is a Ryobi I bought sometime around 2003. The fuel hose would always pop out and spill gas on my pants. I remember it broke down a lot, I knew it was at least 23 years old, and it was a lame little turd even when it was brand new. It pissed me off but I’m too cheap to chuck it.
The other was a Stihl. I got it used about 17 years ago. I’d guess it was at least a decade old when I acquired it but I didn’t ask. That puts it just shy of thirty years old? Can that be?
It’s strange, I remembered nothing at all about it other than it existed and where I’d stashed it in the garage. I must have used it or I wouldn’t have put it carefully in the garage. Right? Right?!?
The Ryobi needs different gas mix than the Stihl (which is same 50:1 as my chainsaw… also a Stihl). I couldn’t even remember if the Stihl trimmer ran. But if I got gas for it and it didn’t run I’d easily use the mix gas in my saw. I suspected it was dead because I have some sort of machine amnesia about it. But what do I know?
I bought pre-mix from the store to maximize the odds it would start. A scandalous extra expense! I picked up a new spark plug because why not? (The plug might fit in my saw too.)
I expected a total fiasco. I decided I’d limit my efforts. I’d try to pull start it (and do all the things a man tries to get an old machine running) but no more than half an hour. I’m a shitty mechanic and I don’t need the drama. Should it fail, I’d throw it in the trash like a normal American disposing of a thirty year old hunk of junk.
Choke, fuel primer bulb, figure out the cryptic 1/0 switch (would it kill them to use the letters “on”/”off”?), hold the throttle. Pull…
Three tries. It was running in three tries.
HOLY SHIT!
I went apeshit cutting grass like a maniac. Fifteen minutes later the string ran out. I drove to the store and got a pack of string. I was so stoked I was probably speeding the whole time.
It took a bit to figure out the magic spell to load string but after that, it’s like a brand new tool. It’s running like a top!
In a world where my battery pack demanded a firmware update in a campground, let’s give thanks for machines that weren’t made like shit!
This doesn’t mean my lawn is trimmed and pretty, only that I’ve another tool in my arsenal. I’ll gain ground with time.
(Some of the weeds in my leach field were head high! The string in the trimmer just isn’t stout enough to handle that.)
I trimmed around my flagpole in time for Independence Day! I’m pleased as punch.
Another note: I have a Dewalt 20volt pruning saw. I call it “chainsaw on a stick”. It was also unused for a few years… though I have made some use of the 20v batteries with a small Dewalt chainsaw. I got it out and was pruning any tree branches which are the right height to batter my tractor cab (which is a hell of a lot of branches!). The ungainly device beat the hell out of my arms but it does its job well.
I’d slapped on a battery without even thinking about it. It was a battery that I’d “rebuilt” by 3d printing my own housing. How cool is that?
Owning a 3d printer means that you’ve the means to fix virtually anything but there’s a lot of learning and design and tinkering before you’re the mechanical wizard you’d like to be. I’d fixed the battery and forgot all about it. It’s neat to see the DIY battery just doing it’s job like no big deal.
Two wins in a week. Can’t complain about that!