Mowing
My husband, Ron, picked up the mower this morning. It has been in the shop for three weeks and I am thrilled it has finally come home. It went in to be repaired when we couldn’t turn it off. And if we got it off then we would have trouble turning it back on. Not what you want in a piece of equipment that gets a lot of use.
We have nearly 12 acres. The pastures get mowed occasionally, the outer yard a bit more often and the orchard and near yard get mowed almost weekly in the growing season. But the part that drives me crazy when it’s not getting mowed often are the feeding pens and the narrow strip of real estate I walk on to feed the animals.
We have all manner of snakes, fire ants, gophers, moles, armadillos and possums out here. It is the snakes and fire ants I worry about most in the tall grass. The other varmints are even less interested in getting close to me than I am to them. The snakes and fire ants are more difficult to see and I’m more likely to come upon them unexpectedly. Well, certainly the fire ants. It’s one of the reasons I always look at the ground when I walk around out here. I don’t want to turn an ankle in a varmint hole, but I really don’t want to get bitten or stung. I’ve already been stung by wasps a couple of times this summer and watching out doesn’t help with wasps. But it does with fire ants.
So, the mower went into the shop three weeks ago and we were hoping for a quick turn-a-round. That’s not what happened. I switched to wearing shorts so I could wear my tall boots out to feed. I have been feeding the llamas from inside their pasture rather than walking through the tall grass outside their fence. I have been leaving the goats in their feeding pen for longer periods of time hoping they would graze it down.
Now the mower is back complete with new blades, the deck now goes up and down as needed and all the fluids have been changed. It has a new battery and a new brake switch. And it now turns on and off when we ask it to. Pretty cool. And very efficient.
Ron is mowing.