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Last year we bought an electric lawnmower, which, granted, can't mow the WHOLE lawn in one go, but I'm not sure that we could do that anyway, and with its aid we didn't manage to mow the whole lawn, ever, in spite of multiple attempts... largely because the grass got too long for the lawnmower. What are you supposed to do then? We bought a scythe and we did cut some grass that way, but it would take Wax way too long to scythe that much grass and me about ten times longer because I'm bad at it. She tried to teach me, but it didn't go that well.
We don't WANT to have a lawn! It's great having a YARD for vegetables and herbs and apple trees, and it's great that it's got hedges all around it, but it's NOT great that the middle of it is flat and full of grass. And removing grass that's been growing unfettered for a long time is SO hard! Last year's grass is lying like dead tangled hair or seaweed everywhere with the new grass that is already somewhat too long pushing up between it. Can the lawnmower even mow safely or will the OLD grass choke it up??? I don't want to think about this! I want to have vegetable beds, flower beds, bushes, and then like... meadow space full of wildflowers that I don't have to touch, and simply draw a line on the ground and fill it up with wildflowers. Unfortunately even that requires planning and work! It's so exhausting when nobody here has energy or executive function???
I think we ARE going to make part of the yard a meadow, but that requires deciding which parts are for beds and which for meadows and we haven't managed to make that decision in the past couple of years' discussions either.
We also have a woodchipper and a ton of old wood that needs to be chipped, but in the past 3 years we have never gotten around to testing it out. Even though we have also barely left the house and yard in that time.
My mom, who is of course retired, and now living with my (wheelchair using) dad and also my sister and brother-in-law in a big 4 (5?) bedroom house in Louisiana, has already built a giant sandbox for my sister's anxious labrador, several raised beds, and a fence around the beds to protect them from the dog, and it's been hot by Finnish standards since like March there. Here we've only had a couple of weeks of nice weather, but I've also never been or aspired to be a gardener like her. She was always making plans for hedge mazes and French formal gardens and buying small trees and bookmarking 5000 pages per seed catalog.
Oh, the other thing about our yard is that our duplexmate - the best friend of the sister of MIL's bff - is also into gardening but she's about as absent-minded as us and my mom put together. So her side of the yard had like five raised bed boxes last year, for example, but instead of filling them with earth and plants, she would sort of just... put some new purchased plants into one every now and then, about half the time still in the plastic pots she bought them in. She leaves shopping bags full of purchased plants sitting outside in the sun until they die. She buries the plastic pots with plants, sometimes quite expensive ones, just... in the earth... like she's planting the plant... but with the pot still there. (I went around and removed the pots for quite a few of these last year when we had the drought, but some of them still suffered.) And then she just leaves piles of trash/random junk/garden implements/plastic storage bins/trimmed branches lying around randomly in between everything. We told her she could plant whatever she wanted everywhere in the yard, and on discussion, we decided that this amount of junk is really only slightly more ridiculous than our own untidiness (even though ours is failing to trim and cut things) and so we have not said anything about it either. I do look around at it with a strong mixture of varying amounts of amusement and dismay though.
I would like to make one of these spiral herb beds, but I like the stone ones more, and those are surprisingly hard to get for a place so close to such a massive quarry.
We don't WANT to have a lawn! It's great having a YARD for vegetables and herbs and apple trees, and it's great that it's got hedges all around it, but it's NOT great that the middle of it is flat and full of grass. And removing grass that's been growing unfettered for a long time is SO hard! Last year's grass is lying like dead tangled hair or seaweed everywhere with the new grass that is already somewhat too long pushing up between it. Can the lawnmower even mow safely or will the OLD grass choke it up??? I don't want to think about this! I want to have vegetable beds, flower beds, bushes, and then like... meadow space full of wildflowers that I don't have to touch, and simply draw a line on the ground and fill it up with wildflowers. Unfortunately even that requires planning and work! It's so exhausting when nobody here has energy or executive function???
I think we ARE going to make part of the yard a meadow, but that requires deciding which parts are for beds and which for meadows and we haven't managed to make that decision in the past couple of years' discussions either.
We also have a woodchipper and a ton of old wood that needs to be chipped, but in the past 3 years we have never gotten around to testing it out. Even though we have also barely left the house and yard in that time.
My mom, who is of course retired, and now living with my (wheelchair using) dad and also my sister and brother-in-law in a big 4 (5?) bedroom house in Louisiana, has already built a giant sandbox for my sister's anxious labrador, several raised beds, and a fence around the beds to protect them from the dog, and it's been hot by Finnish standards since like March there. Here we've only had a couple of weeks of nice weather, but I've also never been or aspired to be a gardener like her. She was always making plans for hedge mazes and French formal gardens and buying small trees and bookmarking 5000 pages per seed catalog.
Oh, the other thing about our yard is that our duplexmate - the best friend of the sister of MIL's bff - is also into gardening but she's about as absent-minded as us and my mom put together. So her side of the yard had like five raised bed boxes last year, for example, but instead of filling them with earth and plants, she would sort of just... put some new purchased plants into one every now and then, about half the time still in the plastic pots she bought them in. She leaves shopping bags full of purchased plants sitting outside in the sun until they die. She buries the plastic pots with plants, sometimes quite expensive ones, just... in the earth... like she's planting the plant... but with the pot still there. (I went around and removed the pots for quite a few of these last year when we had the drought, but some of them still suffered.) And then she just leaves piles of trash/random junk/garden implements/plastic storage bins/trimmed branches lying around randomly in between everything. We told her she could plant whatever she wanted everywhere in the yard, and on discussion, we decided that this amount of junk is really only slightly more ridiculous than our own untidiness (even though ours is failing to trim and cut things) and so we have not said anything about it either. I do look around at it with a strong mixture of varying amounts of amusement and dismay though.
I would like to make one of these spiral herb beds, but I like the stone ones more, and those are surprisingly hard to get for a place so close to such a massive quarry.
