Friday 24 August 2012

cutting a dash

The lawn had got very long and whiskery, as the Systems Administrator who nowadays cuts the grass was first of all ill, and then at various cricket matches, and today wanted to go to the Clacton Airshow to see the Red Arrows.  I once went to the Farnborough Airshow with some stockbrokers, and as I stood at the edge of the tarmac listening to the scream of the engines of a row of harrier jump jets hovering approximately three metres off the ground in front of me, I thought that this came close to hell on earth.  Airshows are not for me.  I really don't like the noise, and I am not terribly interested in aeroplanes.

However, it dawned on me that I could cut the grass myself, before the next band of rain turned up.  The last few days had dried it out nicely, and as rain was forecast for tonight and tomorrow, with showers lasting into next week, cutting it while it was dry and before it got even longer seemed a good idea.  For years I was in charge of mowing the lawn, after I gave up full time work and the SA was still commuting.  However, since then the cutter deck of the lawn tractor I knew how to drive collapsed through old age and overwork, and we have a new one.  I got the SA to give me a quick course before going out in how the current model worked, and decided that after lunch I'd give it a go.  The worst that could happen seemed to be that I failed to start it at all, or that it stopped working somewhere in the garden and I had to leave it there until the SA came home.  I could have frozen with fear half way across the lawn and ploughed helplessly through a flower bed before coming to rest in a hedge, or put one wheel up a bank and turned it over, but I didn't think I was going to.  The basics of driving one lawn tractor must be much the same from one model to another, and after all, I do have a degree in horticulture, and ought to be able to master a lawnmower.

When I was a child our neighbours in Devon had one, and I wanted one quite intensely.  It was an odd craving, for a child who was not otherwise interested in machinery, or cars, but I thought a drive-on lawnmower was quite the most marvellous, desirable thing.  As an adult I am still rather of that opinion.  It turns out that our new one is much nicer than its predecessor.  Instead of having five fixed gears, plus reverse, which were always quite clunky to get in and out of, it has hydraulic transmission which gives infinitely variable speeds in forward and reverse.  Out of habit I was still disengaging the cutting blades before putting it into reverse, because you had to with the old one or it stopped, but when I checked afterwards with the SA I discovered that not merely do you not have to do that with the new one, but it will cut while going backwards.  For finishing off odd little corners this could be very convenient.  We try not to have not too many small and awkward areas of grass, but there are some, as well as those bits of the lawn where it gets to  its widest, and after doing all the rest you are left with a mohican tuft in the middle and have to go round again.  Also compared to the old one the new machine has a very tight turning circle.  Altogether it is great fun, though I will be happy for the Systems Administrator to remain in charge of lawn mowing for the most part, just because I don't have time to do everything else as it is.

I put the clippings into the thinnest stretches of the boundary hedge in the front garden.  It is a bit of a fiddle, dropping big handfuls of grass into the hedge, especially when it is poking you in the face, but worth the effort.  I used to do that cutting the meadow, in the days when I used to mow the grass.  Grass clippings are rich in nitrogen, and act as a mulch to suppress the growth of the grass growing in the base of the hedge, so while you must be careful not to pile them against the stems, they do help improve thin soil and reduce competition from weeds.  I don't want to put them on the compost heap, thought they would be very useful in terms of helping all the ivy prunings to rot down, because they contain too many weed seeds, but if any plantains fancy their chances under the hedge they're welcome to it.

There was some good news on the plant front, after the woe of the suspected phytophthora.  A pair of Photinia serratifolia, that I planted in the front garden to try and hide the electricity pole, are finally growing.  P. serratifolia is a tall-growing evergreen, remarkably drought tolerant once established, or so my books said.  It has glossy mid green leaves, handsome red buds and copper young foliage, and generally looks like a more statuesque and classier 'Red Robin'.  The electricity pole is not pretty, but necessary if we want electricity, since I can't see the electricity company agreeing to come and bury the wires.  The pole itself has a certain post-industrial charm to it, reminding me of a walk we took past an abandoned mine in the Lake District, and tangentially of Ry Cooder's soundtrack to Paris, Texas, but the bright yellow markers the company put on the guy wire a couple of years ago are irredeemably ugly.  I thought about taking them off again, but decided that a large, evergreen shrub to mask the whole thing was the answer.  Pyracantha, with its evil, festering, prickles seemed too mean to anyone working on the pole, and the Photinia sounded just the job.  Sounded but wasn't.  I kept watering the plants, and they kept dying back and producing only miserable little leaves half the size they were supposed to be.  They didn't like the cold winters either.  Now, suddenly, after the wet summer, they have started to grow.  They have made new twigs, and the leaves look large, fat, healthy and happy.

The SA saw the Red Arrows and a Sea King helicopter, but says the air show was a fraction of its former self.  The organisers would have to pay, to get the vintage planes to come, and they can't afford it.

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