Finally got my riding mower back yesterday afternoon, and had time to de-jungle-fy the inner front yard (as distinct from the pasture land that lies between that and the road).

With only a riding mower for the time being—because the self-propelled walk-behind was irreparable—and the dog-run fence in the back yard not having wide gates to drive the riding mower through, I’ll have to shift fence panels to tame that area. Hopefully that will only be a this-summer thing.

And of course there is the aforementioned front pasture, and various other scattered areas to keep under control, such as pondside (though Buddy, our neighbor, has been mowing that since at least last summer). Much as I want to tackle the pasture though, I need to do the dog run first. It’s one thing to give Lucy her flea and tick treatments to protect her but since no such treatment exists for humans apparently, we can’t use the back yard while it’s in that condition.

Of course, today the moisture and instability that set off the storms Wife of Slog and her classmates chased in west Texas on Thursday, have reached subtropical west Georgia, so we’re expecting scattered thunderstorms. Plus, the day after I’ve mowed is generally when I start to experience allergy symptoms, if I’m going to.

If I’m lucky, the delay in getting the mower back may turn out to have spared me, or maybe for once the preventive dose of Claritin will actually work.

Update, Monday morning: The shifting of fence panels ceased to be an option at Castle McGehee because grass thatch eventually secured the bottom rails of the panels to the ground; even for the purpose of removing them there to bring and set up here, getting them unhitched from the ground required detaching the panels from one another so that I could get the necessary leverage. Fortunately the panels haven’t been in place long enough here for that to be a problem. In fact, mowing the dog run went so smoothly yesterday that I continued on to the front field with only a brief pause to refuel and double-check the tires.

There is simply no way, though, that I’m turning all of that acreage into a lawn. First, I don’t believe in big front lawns. Second, the plant life out there is so varied that even if I wanted to make it all look like a golf course I couldn’t without investing years of work (see “First”). So, I’m approaching that expanse as a matter of ecosystem management rather than landscape design; the idea is to prevent the grassland from becoming forest, nothing more. And I took down a lot of oak and pine seedlings yesterday. Oh, and the thistles? Eh, they’ll grow back. They’re stubborn that way.

Though, I do plan to time the last mowing of fall after the seed heads have finished growing, so I can knock them down to make the spring’s wildflowers more prominent.
 

Dividing by Zero