Goodbye to winter

After a day and a half of rain and clouds, which turned the air to a late-winter cool, Saturday was a clear, bright and breezy day on the farm. Spring's greens are overtaking the grays and browns of winter; the winter colors never seemed to get much of a grip on things through the season anyway. Now their time has passed.

So, to spring.

I fired up the mower after sticking my finger into the mower and "fixing" a gas leak that had occurred at last use sometime in October, I think. Surprisingly, the thing came alive (after I had fed it a little gas) and actually lurched forward and even cut some of the grass when I lowered the blade.

I decided to push my luck and take off, blade lowered and cutting, into some of the grass on the border between the pasture and the back yard. Cut grass kept spewing out from under the mower as I headed up toward the garden area.

"If this keeps up," I thought, "I could do some real damage today."

And that's just what happened. The mower hummed along, happily cutting all of the grass in its path until it sputtered to a stop, starved for gas. I fed it again, and it started again -- happy like the rest of the garden tools to be working again.

And so was I. Happy to be working again.

I mowed over the entire garden area and bee yard. I call them that with some trepidation but a lot of optimism because there is no garden, and there are no bees. Still, my mowing is the first step toward giving the garden and the bees a chance to exist.

I then tackled the who back yard, which was beginning to look a little rough with the inconsistent growth of early, early spring. By the time I finished, order had been brought to the the grasslands of the back yard and garden.

Sally -- always a sucker for freshly mowed lawn -- even paid compliments.

It was good to be working again.


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After I was done, I wandered around the farm, taking a few pictures of the early spring greenery and blossoms. The PhotoBucket slideshow to the right will give you an idea of what things looked like on Saturday. You can see all of the at the album on PicasaWeb.




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And, in case you're interested, there's a new landscape on First Inning Artworks. I started this one about three or four weeks ago, but I didn't finish it until this weekend. Not sure why it took so long, but it turned out fairly satisfactorily.