Wild Hope Homestead

When you wake up to the sound of rain, knowing you finished mowing the lawns and mulching a pruning mountain yesterday, it’s a great feeling. Checking the weather forecast is a key part of country life. I like to maximise fine days by getting outdoor tasks done and plan indoor tasks and shopping trips for rainy days.

Our lawnmower is an interesting beast. It has had problems for a while. A few times we’ve thought it was dead, but The Husband continues to tinker with it and we’ve kept it going despite its very specific and sometimes non-committal demands about how it must be started. On this particular mowing session I stopped in my tracks when the lawnmower started sounding different. It suddenly stopped revving up and down and made a smooth, normal noise. What’s wrong with the lawnmower? I thought. Why does it sound normal? Yup, that’s our lawnmower. It continued to sound normal and I was feeling quite amiable towards it until the re-fueling stop. When I pulled the ‘aftermarket’ pull-cord to re-start it, the whole top cover flipped off. All the bolts had somehow come off at some unknown point and the mower was just waiting to pop its cover at me. I could all but hear it doing an evil laugh – “Mwahahaha! You thought I was normal!” The Husband soon put it back in its place. For now. And the lawn was finished.

The Great Vege Garden Expansion Plan is in motion again as I figure out how to layout the near end of the Vege Garden before ordering timber. It might be a bit of an awkward shape, but my intentions are to maximise growing space while keeping the appearance of a curved border flowing on from the Herb Garden.

We triple-teamed the walnut pruning mountain. I wielded the circular saw, cutting the smaller branches off the large ones and cutting up the large ones for firewood. The Husband wielded the mulcher, shredding up the smaller branches into mulch, and The Little Fulla helped him by passing him branches. This system worked very well, that is, until two of the team members suddenly had an urgent, unexplained need to disappear inside to watch robot battles.

I have begun cutting and mulching the grapefruit pruning mountain. It isn’t easy with all the awkward, angled branches. They cannot just be stuffed into the mulcher as is. The question is, will I finish dealing with the pile before I allow myself to prune the feijoa tree, or will I suddenly break my long-standing procrastination of the mammoth task of pruning the mammoth feijoa tree because it’s more appealing than dealing with the annoying grapefruit branches? I know the feijoa branches would be easier to feed through the mulcher…