Well, here in Upscale-Yet-Not-1%-Ville the yardwork gets started at the ridiculous hour of 0600, 7 days a week. It doesn’t help that there is a golf course directly behind our place. I am most decidedly NOT a morning person, as we have firmly established in the past.
But, putting aside my sleep-deprivation-induced surliness for a moment, I’ve noticed something in addition to the early start hour of the $#&king leaf blowers. No matter what kind of landscaping is involved, each household in our neighborhood has a landscaping/yard maintenance service to handle the chores.
Except us.
Saturday morning finds OMWC out bright and early to use our little old-fashioned reel lawn mower on our minuscule patch of lawn before the day starts getting too unbearably hot.
(If it were up to me, we wouldn’t have a lawn at all; a rant for another time.)
So, tonight’s poll question: if you have landscaping or a yard to maintain, do you DIY, do you have your orphans handle it, or do you pay Pud Paisley’s company (or equivalent) to take care of it for you?
My HOA takes care of it. Though it’s fairly small (townhouse).
Living in an apartment complex, all the landscaping is handled by the apartment owners.
We have a yard, but grass never grew well, so it’s the natural grasses that you can find in the nearby woods. Cut them with a weed whacker when they get too long.
I shovel the snow; Dad plows the driveway.
Here @ Chez Tres, Ive already bukkae’d Mother Gaia once with 2,4,-D and have a bunch of mutant, toxin resistant, dandelions that wont die.
Ill let 1 more week pass then they get another money-shot. After that, I end them with fire.
DiY and and I have three orphand to do it while I drink a beer in front of them.
Apparently I am drinking now since its my Friday. *Raises a tall PBR*
*looks around*
*ahem*
TALL MOTHERFKIN CANS!
/paging Yufus
https://youtu.be/DhKHAopx7D0
Superior
Even MOAR Superior
To that I agree
Brody Dalle is more superioror
/paging Jarflax
DIY. And the leaf blower is the gift of the gods, the greatest homeowner time saver besides perhaps the riding mower. Don Quinto should be on Mt Rushmore next to John Browning.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
I want to take every leaf blower within 10 miles of me and throw them in the lake with Spud’s guns.
You just had to dredge up that horrific memory, didn’t you?
I’m sorry, dude, I just wasn’t thinking that it would trigger you. So to speak.
I used to feel that way until I got one. Big leaf maples in fall, firs year round. Constantly needing to blow off the roof and decks. They also have use in getting a Weber really going and blowing smoke flares into gopher tunnels.
I had a handheld blower for over ten years and finally switched to a backpack blower after the carb died. I wish I had done that years ago now.
And snow blowing so the doggy has somewhere to do her business.
I’ve always done the hedging, tree trimming, mulching, weed n feed, etc. I did let a neighbor kid cut the grass for a couple years to earn a few bucks but I am back to doing it now. My dream is that our retirement home will be someplace rural in the middle of woods and there won’t be a lawn. There are so many other things I’d rather be doing with my time when it’s not raining in the spring or fall in Columbus.
n/a
But if I did have any of that, it would probably be no more than a modest back yard where I would practice DIY. I’m never going to live anywhere that I would feel the need to hire someone to do that.
I tried doing it myself for a while, but between a job, commuting, weather preventing work, and a girlfriend who wanted to just hire someone (and pay for it herself), I finally just tossed in the towel and gave up.
DIY.
Damn it, they’re now making them in 9mm. https://www.springfield-armory.com/products/911-9mm/#PG9119
*added to the list*
The .380 version is fantastic, fwiw.
I’m waiting on the paperwork for my SIG P365.
Also, this gun review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmmEf6WrOkI
“It’s got a worse trigger than a Nerf gun. I’m not kidding. I compared it to an entire laundry basket full of Nerf guns, and it was worse.”
Re: P365
I’m a Sig fanboy, but the 365 felt bad in my hands. The gun dug into my palm uncomfortably.
If my luck doesn’t run out, I’m going to get a membership next weekend to a gun club that is literally across the street from me. Which means, I can practice daily so I won’t need to shoot many rounds at a given session to git gud. So I’m thinking I can make it usable without damaging the mitts.
Across the street? A lil jelly.
I have to drive 10 minutes.
The clanging of the duelling tree on Saturdays has made me a wee bit resentful of the waiting list to get in.
My favorite Springfields. May they rest in peace at the bottom of the lake.
https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/aM7jQhIDTx-3nSS0qSNwJw.4kPfh4407gZ-IQR6YynFzQ
DIY
New house, only half a back yard, but working on it. Need to clear the seedlings from the front yard boundaries. I may have bought too small of a mower since I have to refill the tank before it’s done. Need to get the surveyor out to mark boundaries so I can see how much a fence is going to run me.
Fences are good. Very good. The taller the better.
See my #16.
Chain link is not cheap but necessary to keep out the deer and non digging critters
I’ve watched deer jump 8 foot fences. I would imagine the standard 4 foot chain link wouldn’t even slow them down.
The standard 4 foot chain link will do nothing to stop deer (as long as they can see the landing area on the other side). The rats with hooves will eat anything they can.
I have seen their tracks and spoor, but never the rats themselves.
They’ve got no fear of humans in the suburbs here. I’ve seen them fighting (and fucking) on my lawn.
Hawt.
Exactly my experience in rural New York. We had a terrific, tall fence and a great garden, but only one thing kept the deer out: a dog inside the fence.
Once I get a fence, there will be a canine population inside it.
That’s the same thing that kept the deer and coyotes out of out Illinois yard.
Wonder Dog!
I’m going with a 6 footer, if they are stuck in side I can use my sling shot that didn’t fall in the lake. I had a 6 foot fence of woven wire but they would bang into it until they stretched it out and then jump over.
They enjoy a 4 foot fence, just to play around and show off.
We have pretty extensive landscaping that we installed and maintain. We are both into it.
We have a lawn service that handles the care and feeding, but we mow and trim.
It works for us.
This is the first place I’ve rented that actually had a yard. Thankfully small enough I can weed-whack front and back yards on a single battery charge.
I do the yard work with Mrs Time. We keep the flower and perennials well kept and beautiful. The grass is more of a necessary evil that gets cut, no fertilizer or weed killer.
I’m a DIY guy, I’m in the process of moving my garden to where it will get more sun. Garden is 40 X 100 feet, just contracted for a 6 ft high chain link fence, hopefully to keep the deer out. I mow about 3 acres but the same trees that shaded my old garden are now providing a canopy under which no grass will grow. The good news is I only need to mow 3-4 times a year, not a real lawn, more like stringy green weeds. My wife has 4 flower beds that she doesn’t take care of and I ignore. Today though, she gave me instructions to rake her stuff so she can mistreat some more plants again this year.
My friend will bring me 80-100 bags of leaves in the fall to mulch my garden. I still have to use last years but they’ll go in the new garden. Soil is very sandy here, grows pine trees well though.
Lucky! Mine is clay. I need to use a fucking pickaxe to plant flowers!
Just dig out the space and put topsoil in there and mulch on top every year. Been there, did that.
When we bought this house we brought in a shit-ton of black dirt and basically created the contour of the property. For trees we dug a huge hole and added gravel and black dirt.
Lots of work but worth it.
There is clay near here, maybe a 1/2 mile away. Like the glacier pushed the dirt ahead of it and stopped before it got to my house. Sandy is OK but takes irrigation. Water is close here and I have wells in the yard. Absolutely no earthworms (angle worms) though.
In my neck of the woods, you’ve got big chunks of clay, shale, sandstone, limestone, and some topsoil.
It is ridiculous how sandy the soil is here.
There is no flooding, but if it goes more than a week without rain, everything starts dying as they dry out.
Funny, we’re real sandy, maybe a couple inches of soil before you hit riverbed. In the winter and spring we’ll have standing puddles for weeks, but once the sun starts to come out in the late spring into the early fall, we tend to dry out between monsoon-level rainstorms. Last summer was the worst I recall in a while. I think we went about two weeks with no rain, and a lot of younger plants started to really suffer.
I’ve only ever seen standing water here on pavement or frozen ground.
When I moved here I noticed how often it rained — in the first month it never went more than four days. I asked a native coworker if that was typical and he said “what do you mean, it doesn’t rain all the time.” I pointed out that it had rained just that day. His response was “well yeah, but not all day.”
Same here, need irrigation
Well, a garden is something entirely different to my way of thinking. I LOVE gardening. But here, I just have a couple pots with tomatoes and herbs. I will be setting up some hydroponic operations in the house since Mr RAHeinlein gifted me with some great equipment, but I haven’t decided where it will go yet. I might do some actual raised beds for the fall/winter crops.
I do most of my gardening in pots. We have so many critters it seems a waste to keep feeding the little fuckers!
Monsanto or DuPont or some such could make a fortune by inventing some enviro friendly chemical that you could spray on just after you had the lawn cut in the
Spring and the grass would not grow all damn year. Might solve half the illegal immigrant problem too.
You mean Round-up Extended??
I went from 24.5 acres to no yard at all. I have to admit, I miss it. I don’t want to go back to that sort of acreage, but I do want a small yard enough to grow tomatoes and other veggies. Talking with wifey about this, we’ll probably buy ‘something’ in the next year. She want an apartment, but I really want a single family with outdoor space.
The building my wife wants to buy the apartment, they are really nice for sure. Between 1800-3500 sf ft. Luxury up the arse. But I really want a single family to get my yard to grow veggies. I also am thinking about buying in NOVA. Yeah, I know, it’s almost as bad as MD, but it may be about as far as I can get from my clients, for now. The project managers and analysts are terrified of those guys without me in the room.
Well, heck, you can BUY vegetables at any grocery store! /actually said to me by a non-gardener
Not the same. Did you ever smell the leaves on a tomoto plant?
That was my argument, but some people will just never understand the satisfaction of eating a perfectly ripe tomato straight off the vine one tended. Well, more for me!
That tomato tastes better than any other tomato in the world.
Fresh ripe from the plant.
I’ve told this story before:
I was at a “fine dining” restaurant that had a starter called “tomato and avocado salad.” It was literally two slices of tomato, half of an avocado sliced and fanned, and a drizzle of balsamico around the edge of the plate. For $22. I have never been so angry that the dish was totally worth it and considered how I could get into the back office to see who their produce guy was.
A good tomato is a treasure almost beyond compare.
Baby trshmnstr received a gift of various seed packs from my dad last time he visited. The tomatoes just popped up through the dirt. Here’s to hoping she gets a taste of fresh tomatoes this year!
No lawn, at all. We have desert landscaping and some desert friendly plants,, which a service takes care of once a month, and outside of that, 3 acres of raw desert. Which I fight a constant battle to keep out of the landscaped bits.
Mrs. Dean, sadly, has vetoed my requisition for a flamethrower.
See? That makes sense to me here.
SP, surprised you have a lawn at all. I thought lawns were now illegal/frowned upon in that part of the world. Grow some Kentucky Bluegrass (dumb as dirt in a desert) and you’d either get SWATed or shunned. Guessing that’s your rant.
I love nice landscaping, but want no part doing it. Bought a house with minimal landscaping and pay a nice lady to deal with it.
Pretty much!
Tayler Swift showed up to the draft in her bath robe. Not that I’m complaining.
Both. For now. I’m gone a lot over the summer so lawn service mows twice a month. I do the leaf-raking, jungle-taming (also known as cutting down weeds), etc.
Renting and the L/L pays for lawn service. The bastards like to scratch cars in the driveway when they turn the mower around. They got my Sabbrolet (9-7x) but I’m extra careful with the trailblazer ss. I’m home every other Monday (which is gardener day) So I have to remember to park on the street.
When I was in PX, many houses had rocks in lieu of grass. If you’re by a golf course, I gotta assume it’s in high zoot Scottsdale, where grass is more prevalent. I lived in the hood at 27th and northern, not a lot of grass up there.
My wife also has some flowers and potted stuff growing here and there. Nothing edible, though. For my money, I’d only work to grow food.
Nah, we are way too poor for that area! We moved so quickly and won’t be staying here once we can retire, so we’re just renting. It’s a really nice place, though, despite the small lawns front and back.
The kitchen is great. We’ve got the eat-in section kitted out with pantry shelving for all our cookware and serve ware. There are only two things I’d change: get rid of the horrible old-style electric range (on the list since there is a gas stub already in place); and make the kitchen cabinets more user friendly with pull out shelving. The “pantry” cabinet is big and looks great, but one can’t get to anything behind about the middle without taking everything else out.
Ugh, we’ve got that same pantry. It’s floor to ceiling, and if you took the shelves out you could fit a refrigerator in it. So that means you can’t see everything in it without a flashlight and finding a particular thing is like solving one of those sliding tile puzzles.
Yep! That’s the one.
The house in which I grew up had a really nifty pantry cabinet, about the same size, but organized better. One opened the doors all the way and there were shallow shelves covering the inside of each door (about like the shelves on a refrigerator door), then directly in front were two more panels with the same shelves top to bottom. Those 2 units swung forward and toward each other (together or independently) and there were deep cabinet spaces behind them with more shelving about 12-15″ front to back. Above this lower section was a cabinet that had shelves the entire depth of the lower unit. SUPER handy. My Mom knew what she was doing when she put that in.
Also, all the corner cabinets in the kitchen were built-in Lazy Susans. The entire thing swung around. Mom managed to get a LOT of stuff in a pretty small galley kitchen .
Man, that would be perfect for us. I’ve thought about basically cutting a chunk out of the middle of the shelves such that we lose the front and center but can then sidle into the thing and actually access the sides and back. There’s about 4″ – 6″ of shelf on either side that extends past the door frame, otherwise I’d turn the shelves into big drawers.
Yeah, our house was built in 1940 and it has the same pantry. I’m sure it was a small two bedroom and got expanded somewhere along the line. Big bummer is, it got electric ovens and stove. If we end up buying that’s the first thing I’ll do is convert to gas.
I built that with our last house. Real proud of myself – damn this pantry holds a lot. I couldn’t even reach all the way o the back of the corners. When we moved 30 years later I think there was stuff in the back that had been there the whole time. There were a few “so that’s where that was!”
At one point I had it rigged with LED strips and a reed switch such that the inside would light up when you opened the door. It was awesome; you could actually see what was in the damned thing. I didn’t wire it into the house, though, because that’s a little above my pay grade. I had it powered through a battery pack, and because some people in the house have a difficult time closing things, we burned through batteries fast and I stopped replacing them.
I do it all, used to anyway, now I build fences for the MIL,
My BIL is a landscaping fanatic. Several years ago when he was still in the Cleveland area, some yard equipment company actually paid him and my sister to use their lawn as a backdrop for their equipment.
They live in the Dallas area now and thanks to the hot dry summers can’t keep a good lawn, which frustrates him no end.
Hey, if Hank Hill can do it, your brother can, too!
Our lawn is 30,000 square feet. I’m already mowing every four days and I haven’t started watering yet. Prune the shrubs and trees twice a year and maintain 400 square feet of raised bed garden for six months a year. All the chemical stuff I outsource to a private company. I did a price comparison between that and doing it myself. The difference was so minimal, that I decided my time was worth way more than the difference in cost.
About half of our neighborhood uses a service, and the other half is diy.
How’d things go at your wife’s doc? That was today, no?
Tuesday. Bursitis in her left hip. A Medrol pack has fixed the issue. My fear was that the hip was shot, so bullet dodged.
Good to hear something positive for a change! (Sorry for messing up the day. It all runs together and I hardly get over here lately.)
No worries. 😉
Do you have an automatic deduction to Zamzows?
The Zamzows lawn program is what I used for a price comparison. I’m not going to do all the work myself to save $200 on an $1800 annual cost.
I do like some of their products. But I’ve also got North End Nursery that raises all of their own vegetable plants from seed. That said, Zamzows Tomato Boom fertilizer is effin’ crack to tomato and pepper plants.
Well, we po, so everything is DIY around here. Luckily–or unfortunately, from my perspective–we’ve got a tiny yard. I cut it with a Ryobi rechargeable mulching mower, which is coincidentally how I rake the leaves and handle debris, branches, loose trash, etc. There’s some tree trimming we’ll need to hire someone to do just because it’s a probably 30′ tall maple, but everything else is all us. I mostly do the digging, leveling, pulling large things out of the earth, mowing, transplanting, stuff like that. Mme. Naptown handles supervisory tasks, “encouragement”, planning…and she does most of the gardening. Wee Little Princess Naptown has taken it upon herself to pick up dog poop, generally with a shovel, and feeds birds, squirrels, and whatever else wanders through the yard.
That sounds nice tbh
Well, I’m sold on Ryobi, especially their 40v stuff. I’ve got the mower and the weed whacker with a blade attachment for heavy brush that I’ve used to cut down saplings. The batteries are expensive, like a hunge a pop, but they hold a decent charge and last a long time.
The division of labor is pretty solid, too. I bust my wife’s stones about it but she does good work outside. Now that my daughter’s old enough to actually do stuff we spend a lot of family time puttering around in the yard on the weekends. It’s nice.
I was a DIY growing up and into my late twenties. Then one day, I moved into a house with no yard haven’t had one since. I have no children, no pets, and no plans for either. Having a yard to maintain just isn’t practical or necessary at the moment.
When I was a kid, we always hadda do it ourselves. My grandma’s house was a nightmare. Corner lot with about a dozen fruit trees. Apricots, oranges, lemons, peaches, plums, etc. All over the grass. The fruit would fall and mess the place up bad.
We had one place with a giant avocado tree and the first year they all fell. The second year, me and my brother figured we’d try and sell them to the local carniceria. They bought ’em all for a dollar a piece and asked for more! We were shuttling them in milk crates on our skate boards all week. We made like a grand (in 1977!) and eventually all three carnicerias in town had enough. It was a good year.
To be a kid with a spare thousand dollars in 1977?
Holy fuck.
Skateboards and pot, lot’s of pot, and some Mr. Natural tabs. Prolly lasted the summer.
I’m thinking hookers who looked like Cheryl Tiegs.
Ha! I had an assortment of fruit trees to deal with as well. Not only did I have to mow around all twenty odd trees I also had to connect a couple of extension cords together and weed eat around the bastards.
We have a historic house in a historic district, so landscaping is a biggish issue around here. I do it, mostly as I have MS and refuse to let that slow me down, and keeping on doing things as I used to is the best way to deal with that. But it’s about 30/70 around here, most people do it themselves. Oregon, yo.
Howdy zwak!! Or as we say around here, Fuck Off!
/Greetings!
I love your avatar, Tulpa.
Oh, and I have a rental unit. That is serviced by pro’s, as tenants are shit for taking care of stuff.
Winston’s Mom is for rent? I like Redheads……
$20, same as downtown.
Nice photo of the 15th hole. Wonder Dog has figured out the exact moment to bark loudly for maximum putt disruption.
The lawn sprinkler guy is coming tomorrow. Now I won’t even have to move the stupid things around every-other day.
DIY on the lawn. I removed a strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk to make less work. I leave the plant care to my Eastern European peasant wife.
Finally the euphemism we’ve been waiting for.
Hey, I’m famous! I occasionally do my own yard work if the mowing or landscape crew need help, but otherwise I pay my employees to do it when doing other work in the neighborhood. Then I bill the church that owns the big old 3 story house I live in. Between the yard work and snow removal for my house and the snow removal for the big church next door, it pays my rent for the year. I do all the snow removal myself at least. It’s a pretty good deal for both parties.
SP, you’re going to be disappointed in me. Willie Porter is playing tonight at one of the coolest little music venues in Wisconsin about 15 miles from me in the middle of nowhere. I planned on going and had my video recording equipment all ready to go, but I was too tired after work. I fell asleep after eating and when I woke up a little while ago it was too late. I’m sure it sold out fast. I’ll have to catch him next time, maybe at a better time of year.
You’re killing me! We miss Willy so much!
Hi SP! Still working the AZ thing, but the current job has me stuck in Cali for a while yet. Keep your condenser clean!
Hey, Yusef. Guess what?
We finally realized there had to be another air handler someplace for the second floor and found it in the attic. Popped in a new 3 amp blade fuse, and back in business.
Something about the thermostat belongs here.
We’ve got a hard time growing grass because we have a bunch of shade and two big dogs that dig tiger pits in the damn yard for no good reason. As the grass in the back dies off, I’ve stopped even bothering putting seed down. Happily, wild strawberry has moved in. It’s reasonably attractive, handles sun and shade well, deals with traffic, and, you know, makes strawberries. Also, since it’s native, you can pretty much just ignore it and it’ll do just fine. And you don’t have to mow it.
Wild vermin attractors
We’re too urban for serious vermin, plus it’ll give the dogs something to do. Elsewhere we do a lot of stuff like rockeries, shade-tolerant native shrubs and clumping grasses, basically anything but lawn. If the damn grass isn’t going to grow I’m not going to keep throwing good money after bad.
My two cats are exterminators. When we first got here they’d bring in mice and birds every other night, now just birds and maybe once every two weeks.
I use a push-reel mower, and I do the edges with a Fiskars contraption that is basically a pair of garden shears on a long handle. It’s more physical work, but I HATE the sound of loud lawn equipment, and I also like to keep things simple – no gasoline or batteries to worry about. I’m even thinking about downgrading to a scythe; there are some YouTube videos that make it look fairly easy.
In the spring, I spend a lot of time digging up dandelions so they don’t take over. It’s a lot of work, but it prevents my lawn from getting fucking invaded by them. Other than that, I kind of suck at weeding though. When I start my new position at work, I’ll get a massive increase in free time during the day, so I should be able to devote some of that to weeding and mulching so that the garden areas look good year round.
I’m also growing some collard green sprouts upstairs, and I’ll transplant them outside in about a month.
Oh god you reminded me of my Dad’s cousin Nannl. 30 years ago when I visited my German relatives, the day I visited her she immediately put me to work cutting grass with a scythe for her rabbits.
DIY – I also loathe and despise leaf-blowers. We did hire-out large tree removal, but otherwise hubby trims. Bartered for most snow-removal this year.
I love the leaf blower. I was that a-hole with the backpack blower with no ear plugs that cleaned the gas station and grocery store parking lots in the summer.
I used to love running those things. I could clear a 100 yard lot in no time and take a way a 20 gal can of dirt, butts, and garbage.
Strangely, I can’t find a good gardener around here.
No Mexicans in Japan?
The caravans keep drowning.
I think there all on souther California teaching Karate to skinny wimps from Brooklyn.
A question, if you don’t find it too intrusive/weeby:
Did the show Heroes play in Japan? If so, what was the local impression of the character Hiro, and did they appreciate the Hiro/Hero pun?
Saw the ads for it but never watched it myself. The Hiro/Hero pun is punishable by a live boiling. And I support that.
I’m still angry at that show for being fun in year 1, barely tolerable in year 2, and complete shit for however long it went after that.
But you loved Heroes Reborn, right?
Huh. Heard of, and immediately forgotten. I guess by then Sylar wasn’t available to shit all over it. Too bad.
DiY. I have 2 acres of rye and bluegrass that grows about an inch every two days this time of year, which can get a little old. I planted some zosia a couple years ago in some problem spots, and it is perfect grass. Slow growing and beautiful in the heat, but it’s hard to get started and slow to spread at this clime.
I do have a big zero turn with music playing ear muffs, so it’s pretty good “Bob Time”. I’m sure the neighbors think I’m crazed lunatic when I’m running up and down the lawn and head-banging to whatever’s rocking in my ears.
And my grand-kids fill in pretty good as orphans when I need manual labor.
I have a Deere 350X. Headphones are mandatory.
Fake news? Hard to tell in this timeline.
https://mobile.twitter.com/CalebJHull/status/1121424474769973248/photo/1
We have an acre, half wooded, and half semi-wooded. Just got a cub cadet xt1 delivered last week, because the push mower didn’t have enough horsepower to get through even 1 week’s worth of growth in some areas.
I have a makita backpack leaf blower because we have dozens of 50ft+ oaks and hickories on the lot.
To answer the unasked question, the earliest reasonable time to fire up lawn equipment is 8:30am, but I wait until 9. The latest is 8pm, but I usually stop at 7:30.
The surly kids who mow my yard wish they were orphans (or maybe their mom can still be alive, but their jerk dad definitely needs to go).
When the surly kids were surly tots, I could mow the yard in 30-40 minutes. The surly kids take about an hour. The extra time is all fighting between them about who is supposed to do what. I have seen the two altar boys nearly come to blows over exactly where the dividing line is in the lawn.
I would be far more exasperated with them if I hadn’t engaged in the same knuckleheaded behavior when I was a youth.
I’m in the middle of the Spring Yard Project which is involving removing a shit ton of landscaping rocks so I can plant grass there. Not a lot of fun.
My question for those who do mow themselves is what their mower strategy is. My theory is that I’d rather buy a super cheap mower every 2 years and do absolutely no maintenance on it than to spend a lot of money on a mower and then have to take care of it.
I bought the cheapest mower available when we moved in here (less than $150 at the Home Despot), it quickly showed its weaknesses. I’ve never had a mower stall on me as often as this thing has. Damn thing would make clumps of grass and eject them hard enough to knock the ejection cover off and slam the mulcher cover shut.
Long story short, I invested in higher quality this time. I’m happy to sharpen blades and change oil if it means not having to deal with a mower that is in over its head.
Trashy, I hear ya. The front 20 feet of our yard slopes abruptly and then levels out. I finally got wise and picked up a four-wheel drive mower. Much easier on my old-fart bod.
We do have a Hate Tree (otherwise known as a sweet gum) in our front yard. They’re one of doG’s jokes on humanity. Any one who ever had to rake up gum balls knows whence I speak.
Fuck that, I just mow those bastards into the ditch.
I spent $100 on my push-reel mower in 2014, and I haven’t done any maintenance on it besides oiling the blades and tightening this bolt that has an annoying habit of coming loose. Still going strong.
… But if you have a huge hard, a push-reel might not be a good option.
has an annoying habit of coming loose
*cough*
*tortured groan*
That would require me to drive to the hardware store, or possibly walk upstairs to get my credit card out of my wallet!
But if you have a huge hard
Yeah, I don’t want to use a push-reel on my huge hard.
No one should be doing any manscaping period. Gas, electric or push-reel. Let your hard grow free and wild.
That is a long way to go around to say:
Ted waxes.
In college we rented a house for a great price. The only catch was that we had to mow it and it was with a reel mower. Man that sucked.
Last summer I actually spent some $$ to get an electric mower but brought it back because it didn’t have enough oomph to mow the dandelions in our yard. Loved everything else about it. Quiet, easy to start. But my yard is about 60%
weeds and dandelionsnatural prairie grassland and it couldn’t handle that.I’m on my third Honda. The only reason I’ve ever bought a new one is because I wanted a different one. The first two are alive and well.
Buy quality, ffs.
I have a power over small engines. No matter what I try, they give up the ghost as soon as I bring them home.
Lol. You and my neighbor.
I wish I could charge him for every time I got his mower/snowblower/trimmer going again.
What is it with you people?!?
Your neighbor and I have evolved. Why sweat the small stuff when you have a morlock next door to fix stuff?
You know what the morlock is fattening you up for, Mr. Eloi?
Get yourself a Toro Personal Pace for 500-600 bucks. They are practically idiot-proof. There is no choke or primer, it’s built in. They almost always start on the first or second pull. All you have to do is use non-ethanol gas and run it dry at the end of the year. Any excess gas in a can at the end of the season should be used in a car or snowblower and start with a fresh can in the spring. That’s about all the maintenance they need. Maybe a new plug every other year. It even has a port to hook up a garden hose to clean the underside of the deck. It’s great for mulching, but when grass is long, lush, or wet you can bag or blow the clippings. Plus it has so much more power than the throw-aways.
There’s my sales pitch. How did I do?
You lost me at 500-600 bucks. I didn’t even get to the rest of the stuff which seems like work.
Pretty good, but I’ve already got a Toro.
Spend some money to get the cheapest one that will do exactly what you need. I will cheap out on everything but just ponied up for the fwd mower with the Briggs and Stratton engine.
OT: wherein my favorite Manhattan curmudgeon demolishes the idea – promoted in a WSJ article that is paywalled to me – that Butt’s-his-name and Klobuchar are the “pragmatic” choice in 2020.
Meow!
“Butts-his-name” is my new favorite nickname for that guy.
My theory is that Buttigieg is unelectable just because of that last name. It’s almost like some guy with the last name Weiner running for president. Just not gonna happen, pal. Sorry.
It’s worse than being short.
But not as bad as having this picture taken.
lol ready for duty!
I’m not even sure Klobuchar is campaigning. She might be in trouble. She’s never had to run against a competent challenger for office before. I’m not saying any of the 2020 Dems are exactly competent, but sadly they will be more of a challenge than the GOP folks she’s run against in the past.
What about me!?
/embattled UND president Mark Kennedy
The thing that’s notable to me (again) is this is more of that “conversation” they keep going on about, because they’re too chickenshit to actually come out and explicitly advocate things. The only thing they advocate with any definitiveness is gun grabbing. Everything else is “let’s have a conversation” which really means they just want you to think they support it.
We have a small front yard. The backyard is larger but most of it is pool and some surrounding hardscape. I mow, edge, and trim the trees and bushes.
We border the first fairway of acglof course. Our house is set back roughly 100 feet from the fairway and we are on a ridge roughly 75 feet above it. We still average one golf ball per day in the pool.
10.5 acre yard. I mow about 3 acres of it currently…there’s 2 acres that are tilled that I am trying to make a plan for. At least some of it will be fruit orchard, some possibly hazelnuts, a small vineyard… All to say, at some point expect my ~3 acres of mowing to grow to around 4+.
I’ll just add; the proper time for leaf blowers to be used is approximately 10 after hell freezes over.
Mulching blades. Use them.
Don’t be crazy.
Leaf blowers are for blowing out the garage. There is nothing better.
Uffda. I thought you said you used your leaf blower to blow out the garbage. I was pretty surprised by that because you live on the fancy side of the tracks, and even us deplorables in the barrio of East Maple Grove don’t do that.
You are such a poser. You live in the Lakes District of Maple Grove.
You aren’t fooling anyone, Rockefeller.
Whatevs, Cake Eater.
I’d protest your privilege, but I can’t get past the guard at the gate to your palatial estate.
You’re lucky. The second line of defense is surly German Shepherds.
I can get behind using them for unintended uses.
Every fall I have to watch my wife get the leaf blower out and start trying to blow the leaves in the yard into a pile. The problem is that for whatever reason she decides that her pile will be upwind of where the leaves are, so she ends up in a giant battle with the wind. I have learned that it is not a good move to mildly suggest that maybe she moves her pile to somewhere downwind and use the wind to her advantage. The combination of it being my idea and her native Korean stubbornness makes that idea a complete non-starter.
Is that an example of unintended uses?
Mulching blades. Use them.
Seems a bit extreme.
Sure I gripe about my wife, but I am not quite ready to mulch her. No wonder you guys are so short of wimmin in NoDak.
That sounds like an excellent way to spend an afternoon, sitting on the porch and laughing (when she isn’t looking).
I thought NDak was Minnesota’s yard.
It’s beautiful front yard. Wisconsin is it trash strewn, piss-wherever-you-want back yard.
First time I’ve heard someone confuse Wisconsin with San Francisco.
San Francisco actually has occasional sun and blue sky.
I should let CPRM takeover for me since I wasn’t even born in Wisconsin. Just lived there for half my childhood. It’s like you guys are making mom jokes and I’m thinking, “Go ahead, that’s my stepmom.”
He’ll be along just after we all go to bed.
Does that make you a step-Sconnie?
It is late. We don’t have time to type the Wisconsin jokes s-l-o-w-l-y so CPRM can get them.
I’m from Lord H’s stomping grounds. I took “white flight” a little too far.
Uffda. If that is the case, I now know why you guys are always making fun of Minnesoda. We are the singlewide in the neighborhood with a couple of cars up on blocks.
Backpack blowers are the schnizzle. Blowing off the driveway, walkway, patio, after mulching is a breeze.
They don’t sell brooms in Idaho?
Brooms are for peasants. You know, people from Wisconsin, Minnesoda and Ohio.
The more I think about it, the leaf blower might be the single best example that America is the richest, most awesome country in the world, ever.
Too lazy to spend 5 minutes with a $5 broom sweeping off your sidewalk? But this $250 leaf blower and let science do the work for you!
I use my leaf blower to actually blow leaves. Last year I learned that there’s a such thing as “too big to rake”. When the pile of leaves for 1/3 of the backyard is 20x20x4, a rake doesn’t do much more than tickle it.
I put out at least 120 bags of leaves last year. And that was mulched.
Burn them.
That would leave burn marks in my lawn. This is not that type of neighborhood, otherwise I would.
My contention is that very few people need to remove leaves from their lawn. Chop them up and let them lay and make your sod more healthy.
Of course, this doesn’t jive with many people’s expectations that lawns look like mini golf courses.
I actually agree wholeheartedly, and there are spots where I pile the leaves to mulch them into the sod the next spring. I just mulched a pile in the front yard, and the grass is loving it.
I have a tow behind sweeper, and my neighbors and I have a centralized burn pile to dispose of them.
Sweeper rocks, but I’ve wore through the leading edge of the catch bag, and need to fix or replace.
SP’s secret shame: she uses the leafblower to dry her hair.
Guess that means she blowing leaves with her hair dryer. Shhhh, nobody tell her.
No shame in that. I use the leaf blower to knock the dingleberries off my hairy ass. The secret is to go bottomless for a few days so the shit clumps totally dry out. Then you turn the leaf blower on them. At first it sounds like a bunch of castanets clacking together, but as the clumps break apart and blow away that noise all stops. Just keep blowing until you hear the sound of silence.
Now you just need to get the edger out to do some manscaping, and you’ll be in good shape for spring.
Dude, that’s what razors are for.
“Honey, where did my ass razor go?”
“I don’t knowwwwww, last I saw it, it was sitting next to your nutsack razor”
“I’m looking at my nutsack razor right now, but my ass razor isn’t here!”
“did you check next to your foreskin blower?”
“you know I sold that when I converted!”
Um, wouldn’t she be the foreskin blower?
Razors?! That’s what bidets are for.
My father used a leaf blower to save a thing he was doing for Conan O’Brian from drying wrong.
^This
To be fair, however, since I cut off all my billowing tresses for my supposedly-new-career-that-isn’t-to-be I don’t really need a hair dryer.
My go to in AZ, WY, MT and NC were native yards. If it grew there, it belonged there. Except for African Daisies in AZ. I pulled those out with extreme vengeance.
In HI I have a yard service to keep the grass managed. I do the gardening, trees and hedging. The problem with living in a tropic environment on the windward side is that I fill three green bins twice a month.
I was waiting for you to come shitlord it over me with your garden. *sigh*
Are African Daisies not native to the American Southwest? Huh. Who knew?
I do indeed pay a Honduran man to tend the garden, mainly because I have no idea how to identify and care for my plants.
He has become an expert on local plants, soil, etc. so we value that immensely.
I do all yard care myself pretty much.
Its a rather small yard really so I can do all the mowing with push mower in about 25 minutes I think…never timed it actually.
My kid is now old enough to handle gathering up the sticks.
In almost 15 years of being married, my wife has mowed for roughly 20 minutes.
20 minutes? I’m impressed.
Whoa, I’m testing what appears to be be a hotspot for a Chipotle EMS installation, and I’m using it now to type this, security, Bahhh……
I can’t be the only one who doesn’t need EMS after eating Chipotle. Bunch of defectives out there.
We all need a Safety nap sometime…..
All DIY, all the time. It’s one of the reasons we’re moving. Lots of grass, raised garden beds etc. We like it, but it’s starting to eat far more of our free time than we’re willing to sacrifice.
This entire series is great, Rogan and Graham Hancock,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxAkiI6xJY0
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/yankees-kate-smith-statue.html
“It’s psychosomatic, dude. Don’t sweat it.”
If only it was that easy. Sometimes I think I’m losing my fucking mind,
I knew I was up early for this flight but didn’t realize I would catch Glibs After Dark.
https://joebiden.info
???
OMG. That’s genius.
That made my week.
DIY
I live in Leaf Central, therefore a blower is a gift from the Gods. That said, I don’t get started with power equipment before 8am.
I do however have a 100hp wood chipper and 5 ton track loaders that I use to annoy my neighbors.
Re: mowing, trimming, lawn treatments, etc., I tell people “I have a guy.” He’s worth every cent to me. I used to think those were things I should be doing myself, but once I hired someone I never looked back. I have a full-time job where sometimes i have to work late, so I might miss the one night of the week without rain to mow the lawn, then it’s overgrown by the weekend. And frankly, I’d rather spend my time on other tasks.
Late to the party: I have always done my own and still do. We used to maintain about two acres around the house. A year after all the kids were gone I was out sweating in the sun and realized….I am the only one that ever comes out here and the only time I do is to cut grass. Fuck that. now I keep a patch in the front about 50 feet out and in the back the fenced in dog yard. The rest is in the process of coming up wild. I collected some acorns and pecans and planted them around the outside of what I am maintaining and it looks like enough escaped the squirrels to make some nice woods one day.
I can do my yard maintenance in an hour or two one day per week.
Even later to the party. Our Colorado yard is xeroscaped, meaning it’s all mulch, rock and tall bunch-grasses.
The “Xero-” in xeroscaping is pronounced “zero” which is apt, as it’s the amount of yard work I do. The xeroscaping minimized work required, and I hire a little Vietnamese guy to do that.
I friggin’ hate yardwork.
I pay someone else to mow the grass. All other duties I do myself, which is a short way of saying my it mostly doesn’t get done and my yard looks feral.
I second Animal’s opinion about yardwork. Having lived in Floriduh nearly my whole life, I view yardwork as a nonstop exercise in futility.
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