Our Practice Yard on Rocky Ridge

Mowing the yard was never a big deal. I just mowed when it was getting long. Kind of like getting a haircut. There was nothing fancy about it. I usually didn’t bag or mulch. Most of my mowers didn’t even have those options.

But now that I’m retired and have moved to a new neighborhood, I thought I would try more than a token effort at proper lawn care. In the year Catherine and I have lived here I have learned a lot about what is required to maintain a nice yard. However, I have not put it into practice very well. The yard still looks like one used by lawn services as an example of “before.”

It seems to me that you have three options with lawn care. You can just mow it and hope for the best; you can apply fertilizer, weed-killer and water; or you can hire a service to handle it all. I have decided to fail at the middle approach.

I’m following a four-application program that is supposed to fertilize and kill weeds. It’s not working the way I thought it would. I have a yard that looks like I intentionally planted crabgrass with a drop spreader.

Complicating things, it’s been dry around here. We could use a soaking overnight rain. But I can’t blame the lack of rain on my bad yard entirely. The yard has a sprinkler system. It hadn’t been used recently and I’ve never had one before. As a result, I had to have the water blown out of it twice last fall after I accidentally ran water through it again before winter. I also replaced the old mechanical controller with a digital wireless system. Now I can waste water from anywhere in the world. I still need to learn how to adjust the spray heads.

The entire neighborhood was built in the mid-1990s, so the terrain is not as mature as other long-established areas of town. Neighbors have told me that they have endured a lot of shifting in their yards as the ground settled over time. That’s because it’s built on top of a rocky hill. Many of the early planted trees died because they couldn’t develop deep enough roots. Apparently, our yard was so rocky, they needed a rock drill to break some of them up. The developers must have leveled out the rock and hid it with a layer of dirt. There are hidden dips all over the yard. I really should fill them in before I twist an ankle.

I learned that you don’t need to dig very far before you hit rock when I bent the frames on a couple of election signs I was setting in the yard. The driveway and sidewalk to the front door have already been mud-jacked to raise them in spots.

We’ve barely started on the landscaping. That’s Catherine’s area. We discovered that the shade tree for our deck is buckthorn. Buckthorn is everywhere up here. And for some reason, we have cactus growing along our woods line. Yes, small cactus which must have been transplanted here. I pulled out what I could find. There are thistles and nettles growing through our landscaping rock next to the house that I haven’t seen in the other places I’ve lived in town.

It’s almost as if we moved to a different habitat. I suspect that hilly Red Wing has different types of vegetation due to the various types of sediment at different elevations. This is the result of being part of the huge drain from the meltwaters of the last glacier. 

So, we’re adjusting to what we have and are not complaining. We love it here. For one thing, this yard is smaller and much easier to mow than my last one. I even bought a new lawn mower so I could start fresh. Now, one year later, I have duct taped a couple of broken parts and replaced the self-propelling drive belt. It had jumped out of a pulley guide and after a getting it back in, it completely jumped off the main shaft pulley and the blade chopped it up. Guess I did something wrong. A new belt and some YouTube instructions put me back in business.

Neighbor Jim has demonstrated some of the tricks he uses to keep his yard looking like a baseball field, including his unique method of spreading fertilizer. I assured him that being next to my yard will guarantee that his yard always looks great.

We’ll figure the yard out. I seem to be getting more exercise now than I did before I retired and I’m learning a lot of things everyone else seems to know already. But I’m enjoying it. It’s a great neighborhood here on Rocky Ridge.