Sorry, but I have no pictures today, hence why I'm using Qumana to write my blog today. Anyway, got quite a bit done the last couple of days. Primarily, and something that needed to be done a while ago, I got the blades off of the riding mower and sharpened. They're still pretty dinged-up from hitting branches, rocks, etc, but the grass should be cut prettier (as opposed to pulled). Also that same day (Monday) we got a couple of grass/hay bales made. We have a 20 gallon can that we fill-up with grass, and then we tie it off with twine that we have, flip the barrel over to dump the home-made bale out, and Voila! - we've achieved bale-ness! :-) That day I also got a load of laundry hung-out to dry, and after I got the blades sharpened and put back on, I brought the clothes in. So it took pretty much all day to get that load of laundry done, but by gosh it did get done. *smile* It took longer than expected to remove and put the blades back on because I hadn't done it since we got the mower last year. I couldn't find the manual that came with it, so I had to go with the ole' trial and error method. Prior to looking at the situation, I thought it was going to be pretty straight-forward, but I was wrong, there was more do it. The important thing is that I got it done! Oh, I suppose I could've looked for pictures and instructions on-line, but being the man I am, I thought it would be "easy". *grin* Ya know I did take an auto mechanics class in high school, and have worked on my own cars in the past (once swapped engines from one to the other, or not, gosh, I can't remember what I did with the 'cherry-picker' back in 81')
Yesterday I tested the newly sharpened blades on a portion of the back yard. Seems to cut the grass pretty well. We also went to town (before the mowing) and got a few odds and ends. Not much because it's the end of the month and the money in our bank account is really low. Rain worked in her garden for a bit. Today we're going to open the gate to the garden and let the chickens rummage through it for bugs and grasshoppers. Rain says they're EVERYWHERE, and so far nothing she's tried has helped for long. She has tried picking the bugs off and tossing them in a bucket of soapy water, spraying leaves with garlic water (mixed w/something else?), and even some un-organic ant/bug spray that we got strictly for ants a while back. Nothing is really helping. Yeah, they're not getting everything, and we've gotten a ton of tomatoes already, but still. Hopefully the chickens won't kill anything, say like the pumpkins or squash. We shall see I guess.
I'm really happy that our friend told us about using bleach and white vinegar to use in the pool for cleaning and algae control. So far it seems to keep it cleaner longer than the algaecide and chlorine tablets that're made specifically for pools. Who'd a thunk? :-) So we figure we'll just dump a bottle of bleach and a bottle of vinegar in there once a week and we should be good. They're MUCH less expensive then the pool chemicals! :-)
Tags: swimming pool, chemicals, garden bugs, mower blades, cherry picker
2 comments:
tell me if that works for the pool if so will try it in ours. but ours is not as big.
Karen
We already know that it does. That's how we got it clean. I vacuumed the bottom as best as I could without being able to see it, then once it was refilled we added 3 bottles of vinegar and 2 of bleach, and it looked SO much better it was really quite amazing. Since then we've pretty much just added 1 bleach and 2 vinegar per week. So far so good :-)
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