Time to mow

 

Photos taken 8 days after photos in previous post, 15 days after the first pics

After one week

 After one week still alive and pretty green:

And the new growth is a couple inches tall. Almost time to mow!

Both photos taken Sunday, 6 March 2022.

Found on the blacktop

I found this bit of dried mud on the driveway three or four days after the last snowfall. Must have scraped it up when I went onto the lawn with the snowblower:

About three inches long and an inch wide, and half an inch thick, the mud of it. It was pretty well dried out, but still showing green and responding to the sunshine. Why did I rescue it? Because it was trying so hard.

View from the opposite side:

I grabbed a cold cuts container from our kitchen garbage, put some potting soil in it, and pressed the little piece of sod down into it:

Watered it real good:

And put it where it'd get some light (see bottom of picture):

Everything else in the picture is snapdragons, dug up from the garden late last fall. And cuttings for the garden for the spring.

The snapdragons bloom like crazy under the lights, but the cut flowers don't last.

All photos taken Sunday, Feb 27.

Watering Cones

8 April 2020

I bought a 6-pack of "watering cones" from Harbor Freight last summer. First use today, for my first two "type 1" lawn grass that I grew under lights over the winter.

Jammed two cones into the ground, filled two soda bottles with water, turned a bottle over & tried to shove it into the cone. No good: The bottle collapses, squirting water out. You can't shove the bottle into the cone if the bottle collapses.

Tried the second bottle anyway. Same result.

Went to the comments at HF. Love2ski says:

Fill bottles with tap water and attach water cones as shown [bottles shown right-side up]. Note, you'll need to give the bottle and cone a little "TWIST" for it to fit snugly. That's it!!Turn the bottle upside down without squeezing it and check the water flow.

Okay Art
1: fill the bottles
2: mount the watering cones on the bottles
3: insert cones in ground
I'll give it a shot next time.

I thought it'd be better to avoid pulling the cone out of its hole in the ground and shoving it back in, repeatedly. Maybe that's not a problem. Will see.

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Note: Love2ski also says

...there's a plastic ring thingy that is left behind when the bottle cap was initially opened. Remove plastic ring thingy from bottles. Use a utility knife, scissors etc. (plz. be careful)

I removed it anyway, out of habit, but the thought is worth repeating.

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3/4" SCH40 PVC pile fits easily into the cone (where the bottle should go).
The OD of that pipe is given as 1.05".
The cone opening as I measured it is 1 1/16", so 1.0625, so the 3/4PVS is a nice fit. Goes in about an inch and a quarter.
What's the OD of a 1/2" PVC pipe fitting?
Aetna Plastics says 1 5/16" for half inch PVC tee. Way big.
but for a reducing tee, 1 1/16" for half inch legs. Possibly perfect.
Are these threaded or slip fit? Or does it even matter.
These questions might merit a trip to the hardware store, but not in a coronavirus environment.
//
I would consider a PVC adapter 3/4" Spigot (1.05" OD) to Female GHT (easy to make soda bottles fit FGHT)
PVC pipe to Garden Hose Thread adapters.

Not finding it.

That, and fixing the economy, that's my life.

Mowing the lawn this past spring, I stopped short when I saw a little patch of grass, the kind you might say Wow, I wish my whole lawn looked like that! It was dense, it was short, it was a pretty shade of green, and the blades were narrow but not too narrow, just like I like. It was a couple weeks since I mowed that spot, and that little patch of grass was still short and even. I shut the mower down right there so I didn't lose the spot, went up to the house and got a shovel, scooped up a bit of that precious green patch, and planted it in my garden where I could keep an eye on it.

It used to be a farm, where I live, a cow farm. I don't know if they ever planted lawn grass after they built the house, or if people just mowed what was there and it started looking like lawn. But I know that beyond the rock wall, where I found my precious little green patch, it wasn't mowed when I moved in. Looked like it hadn't been mowed, ever.

I'm there now 10 years or more, and mowing beyond the wall since the start. It looks like a lawn now, mostly. But it's patchy, a little of this, a little of that. That's why I look it over when I'm mowing, looking for things I like and don't like about the different patches of lawn. And when I saw that patch of short grass, I knew that was what I wanted.

Most people would buy some grass seed and "overseed" their existing lawn, or just hire somebody to make it nice. Me, no. I'm gonna dig up a little bit of it and grow my own lawn from scratch.

//

The bit of lawn that I dug up was about a four-inch circle. (About four inches, but not really a circle.) I measured it this morning, in the garden: It's a foot square. (More than a foot, but not really square.) Across the long points, 20 inches by 24, where it's reaching out with runners to take over more territory. So it's fast-growing.

No, that's not right. It is fast spreading. I could take my 12-by-12 clump, tic-tac-toe it into nine little four-by-four squares, plant the squares a foot apart, and a year from now have nine, maybe 10 square feet. After another year, 90 or 100 square feet. After four more years I could cover a couple acres. Two or three years after that, maybe the whole county.

Hey, I'm retired. What else am I gonna do? (But not the whole county!)

//

I didn't tell you the best part. It's fast-spreading, but not fast-growing. When I got back to that original patch of grass with my shovel, I mowed it before digging up a sample. So it was 2½ inches tall when I transplanted it to the garden. That was back in May. Five months have gone by, and I didn't mow it again after transplanting it. Didn't mow it for five months. I measured it this morning: It's five inches tall. In five months it only grew 2½ inches.

It grew half an inch a month. Oh yeah, that's what I want. I'm doing it. I'm doing my whole yard.

Thermoplastic

To me it's a pretty new word, thermoplastic. You get some, heat it up, form it to the shape you want, and let it cool. Done.

Links so I don't lose them:

https://www.pnta.com/customer-service/faq/tips-on-thermoplastics/

Owen Duffy's idea

At owenduffy.net: Garden hose couplers – there has to be a better way.

Not sure what I'm looking at in the picture. Looks like a hose end repair fitting where instead of a threaded end you have a quick connect.

I was looking for something like that the other day, a hose-barb fitting that slips into a hose end, a hose-barb fitting with a quick connect instead of a GHT threaded end. Th'aint no such thing.

But if I'm looking at what I think I am, owen duffy made one by modifying some other fitting.