First Mow of the Season

Steve mowed our lawn today!  The first mow of the spring season.  Living in California my entire life, until 2 years ago, I never knew that you didn’t have to mow your lawn all year round.  From what I think I remember, you normally have to mow your lawn in the winter in California.  Or at least, I can remember being woken up every Wednesday around 7:30am from the gardeners mowing our large backyard.  We had an abnormally large backyard for the San Fernando Valley.  Almost an acre to be exact.  You can’t get a yard that size anymore.  Luckily my dad bought the land in the 80’s, when land was still relatively inexpensive, and built our family home.

Over here in Tennessee, you don’t mow your lawn in the winter.  How convenient!  The grass just doesn’t grow when it gets to a certain temperature (a temperature it never gets to in CA).  I’m sure many people who don’t live in sunny CA are rolling their eyes and thinking “Duh, where have you been?”  Well….in CA, that’s where!  I’m just learning about the different seasons over here in the South where there actually ARE seasons.  Ahh snow, how I love thee!  Autumn, you are gorgeous too!

Our grass was getting pretty long.  I picked up the dog poop yesterday and could barely see it through the forest of grass!  And let me tell you, the dog poop is usually not hard to miss with our beasts of dogs!  It’s like picking up human poop out there!  Sorry if that was a little bit too much information.  It’s just that I hadn’t done it in a couple weeks and I was pretty much up to my eyeballs in poop.  It was not a pretty situation….nor a pleasant smelling one either.

Steve loves our riding lawn mower.  Sometimes I like to mow the lawn too, since that thing is just so fun to drive, and I have to put up a pretty good fight for Steve to let me take the reins….or wheel as it were.  (By the way, those brown patches on the right are courtesy of our dogs.  They enjoy relieving themselves in the perimeter of our patio, which completely killed the grass there, and it’s now completely hard, compacted dirt.  We’re contemplating if we should just leave it until we try to sell the house, or if we should put sod in and try to fence off the area until it has grown in.  Suggestions?)

We even got a free pressure washer with our mower when we bought it!  That has really come in handy since we have dogs with muddy feet that like to stain our concrete brownish red from the clay dirt on their paws.

We actually got an upgraded pressure washer because they were out of the one that was supposed to come with the mower.  Score!  That reminds me, I really need to pressure wash the patio before Elizabeth’s bridal shower next month.  Put that on the “To Do” list.

This is courtesy of Camelot this morning.  I had the dirt and Miracle Grow mixture all nice and leveled out yesterday in my raised vegetable/flower bed, and this morning, after leaving Camelot alone in the backyard for a couple hours, I found this lovely sight.  At least I hadn’t planted the seeds yet!  Then I would have probably been alot more upset.  Luckily this is an easy fix.  We’ll be getting a little fence to go around the vegetable garden so this won’t happen again.  Camelot usually doesn’t jump small fences (or baby gates) unless there’s a thunderstorm and he’s trying to get to us because he’s scared.  The little pansy.

Look at this boy.  He doesn’t exactly scream “ferocious” with this face.  He likes to put on a mean front if you’re a stranger ringing our doorbell, but inside he’s just a pansy boy.  Your secret is out, Camelot!

I installed these stone tiles that lead to our hose today.  We still have to put either mulch or gravel in between them, but at least part of it is done.  It always gets so muddy back there, and it’s such a hassle trying to get the hose out, so hopefully this will help.

I also dug out several of our dead bushes in the front (Steve helped) and raked the old mulch into piles that have yet to be disposed of.  See, we didn’t have any heavy duty trash bags to dump it into so we just had to leave it there over night until we could get said trash bags.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!  My beautiful peonies will go in this large spot in the front.  I can’t wait until they start blooming!

Another accomplishment today was putting the bricks and top soil around each of the two trees in our front yard.  I think it looks so much better than before!  Unfortunately I didn’t take any before pictures, but just imagine that those bricks aren’t there and that the roots are sticking out of the ground.  We still have to put some mulch on top of the soil, but it already looks 100x better than it did.

Did I mention that I love spring?  Look at these blossoms!  Gorgeous!

I love when the earth comes back to life after a long flowerless winter!

I think this deserves to be framed.  God’s creation is so pretty!

This tree is a thorn in my side……except in the early spring when it looks like this.

Oh glory, if only it could look like this all year round!  Except during the spring, this tree is exceptionally ugly!  It hardly produces any leaves, and the branches hang downwards like a frown.  We were planning on ripping it out and planting some rose bushes or something with a little more color, but then I saw the blossoms.  Oh how these blossoms nurture my soul!  I’m sure in a couple months I’ll want to rip it out again, but for right now, it’s just so pretty to look at.