"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:47b418ed$1@news.povray.org...
> http://www.xkcd.com/223/
>
>
>
> So, what are all you non-single people doing today?

Unfortunately Lady and I are some 3000km, 3 timezone hours, and 3.5 flying 
hours apart for the next 12 days.  She remained in New Zealand, while I 
temporarily returned to Australia for a family funeral (we couldn't afford 
to both come back).  So we talked by phone several times today.

My biggest task today was getting this house's yard back in some tidiness. 
This mostly involved bashing up the 4-foot-high overgrowth of flowering 
giant paspalum, high lawn grasses and weeds that took over the entire back 
garden and lawn (10m x 20m area) in the two summer months and a week while 
we were overseas.  (It was drought conditions when I left, but a lot of rain 
fell in Eastern Australia since then due to a strong La Nina pattern forming 
in the Pacific Ocean)

It was too dense for the 4-stroke mower, which choked almost immediately and 
also cut poorly because the mower's skirt flattened the long stems below the 
cutters.  So I mixed up the 2-stroke fuel and went out with the nylon cord 
snipper.  The very tall coarse stems of giant paspalum grass will tangle and 
wrap around a rotating head and bind it up if you approach it in the wrong 
way and I had quite a few stops to pick it apart.  I found best results when 
I slashed in high passes first and gradually cut it down in successively 
lower passes and also worked from the back towards myself (I walk backwards 
through the tall grass as I sweep side-to-side instead of walking forwards 
over the already-cut part).  This threw the cut stems away from the working 
area and I got very little cutter tangling then.

Eventually I got all the yard snipped roughly down to a few centimetres 
height.  Then I did two runs over it with the lawn mower -- first on its 
highest cut, whereupon I stopped many times to remove a helluva lotta 
grass-catcher loads full, then did it all again on an almost scalping low 
cut, whereupon I took away even more catcher loads per area than the high 
cut did.  The idea here was to weaken the tussocky paspalum and give the 
lower lawn grasses more chance.

I filled up the 50-litre compost tumbler with clippings during the last run, 
interleaving each catcher load with a layer of high-nitrogen fertilizer 
(dynamic lifter).  That will create a scalding heat that kills the grass 
seeds as the bacteria set to work breaking it all down.  I still have 
another 50 litres of grass clippings in the wheelie bin, and another 50 that 
I've just had to dump into heaps!

Romantic day, huh?   :-)

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