A New Record

March 28....a date that will go down in history as the earliest we have ever mowed the lawn.

Ethan was quite anxious to get agoin'...so much so that he has been sharpening up the mower blades and testing the machines, as of last week.

And today he asked if he could start.
And he did. Mowed for close to 3 hours. He was going to quit after 2 but then I came outside to help and I guess he was stuck :-)


During the course of lawnage we discovered a major part of an apple tree--nearly half of what was left--had broken off...
...you can see it was pretty rotten inside. Plus, we had strong winds for the past two days.

This poor tree has lost major limbs over the past 3-4 years. So much so, that those two younger looking branches you see are actually sucker shoots that I allowed to live out of sympathy. I thought the tree should be be applauded for making the effort so I didn't prune them out.

I also figured it was a last ditch effort to get a couple of apples out of the fading relic.

Basically, it is one fourth of what it was in it's prime.

I stopped mowing to go get my trusty bow saw. There was not much to cutting it off since it was so rotten. Cutting it up for the burn pile took a bit more effort. And judging from the rings, the branch is around 20 years old. I figure the tree itself is around 35 or so.

Far from being sad, it simply means God is taking care of me in my increasing age, as I will have less and less people around to help make applesauce, thus, cutting back on the apple trees is fine with me.

I'll just replace it someday (and the one next to it that may be following suit) with a nice flowering tree that will simply look pretty and not require harvesting in the fall.

But getting back to the mowing, I glanced over old blogposts to discover if, indeed, this was the earliest of all mowings.

I discovered that the peas of last year came up a whole month later than this year.

Also, we had a snow on April 20th...that's a little depressing, actually.

But not nearly so much as reading how I'd lost over 20 pounds by this time, last year.

Ouch!

Somehow the weight-loss karma has not kicked in this time around.

Yet.

One thing we've learned for certain though, today: it's terrifically early for mowing.

Then too, it's not always wise to look into the past.
 

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