mowing

The plan today was to cut down the long grass in the back garden.  I am a big fan of letting some of the lawn grow long in all except the titchiest garden.  It provides a good wildlife habitat, it saves you the time and effort of cutting it for several months, and the contrast in height and texture with the short grass gives you a whole new flexible and low cost design element to play with.  If you are going for spring flowers you can keep the area short from midsummer onwards, or you can leave it long all summer and give it an autumn cut.  It must be cut at least once a year, or after a few seasons it will have turned into scrub, so you don't want to leave it much later than now because at some point during the winter it will collapse and then it really will be difficult to cut.

Ours gets an autumn cut, because we like the late summer bleached, waving seed heads effect, and because it represents that much less lawn mowing over the summer.  We used to struggle to cut it with the lawn tractor, but the screams from the engine and cutting gear warned that any moment of this mechanical abuse could be their last, and then we resorted to spending long, back-wrenching hours walking up and down swinging a petrol driven strimmer, before the Systems Administrator invested in a power scythe at the Chelsea Flower Show about fifteen years ago.  The scythe spends fifty-one weeks of the year sitting in the garage, and for the other week it is invaluable.

For the past couple of weeks we have been watching the weather forecasts in between other commitments, and today turned out to be the day.  As the Systems Administrator said, the grass was not going to get any drier from this point.  The SA got the scythe out of the garage, and I was on standby with the rake to haul the cut grass out of the way.  Then there was an anxious half hour in which the SA peered into the scythe's innards and fiddled with it while the scythe refused to run.  I had got as far as finding the advert for the local garden machinery services firm in the parish magazine before the scythe finally consented to go and keep going, fuelled by an excessively rich mixture which the SA thought gave us limited running time before the whole machine would need stripping down to do something to the carburettor.

The SA drove the scythe, which is no fun and is the SA's least favourite gardening job of the whole year.  The machine is self-propelled, indeed, you need to keep it under firm control to make sure it doesn't leap into a flower bed and mangle the inhabitants, but it vibrates fiercely and is very hard on the arms.  I raked like crazy, which is also hard on the arms in a different way, and stuffed the cut grass into old Strulch bags to take to the dump.  It can't go on the compost heap because it is full of weed seeds.  Two years ago it ended up by the bonfire, in the vain hope we might be able to burn it on the tail end of bonfires, and most of it was not burnt but had to go to the dump eventually, and by then half of it had got mixed up with rose prunings and made the most almighty muddle that it took me ages to clear up.  Last year it went straight into bags, which required two trips to the dump to get rid of, but was still quicker than messing around trying to burn it.

Sometimes I have fantasies of getting a proper manual scythe and learning to use it.  You can go on courses.  I don't think it would work, though.  I think the grass has to be dry to cut properly, and by autumn it never is.  Hay is made in mid summer and after that I think the ground was traditionally grazed for the rest of the year.  Still, at least we only have to do the long grass once a year.  I am just so relieved that in the end the machine worked when needed.