TO MOW OR NOT TO MOW

This time of year, the lawns in our area are filled with wild flowers, especially small, yellow flowers. Some lawns are lucky to have blue bonnets, but not ours. This is what our lawn looked like up until a couple of days ago.

There are parts of the lawn that have no flowers, or very few flowers, so I will mow that portion, carefully avoiding any flowers I encounter. The flower below is a verbena. Note how I mowed around it.

All the plants in these pictures are native plants. That have to be very hardy because we do not water our lawn and the soil is not what you would call very deep. Below is a portion of our lawn.

That gray patch is rock. If you dig down in a grassy area, you will most likely hit rock after about an inch. The only reason we have any landscaping at all is because we built some raised beds.

There is a section of lawn way back on our property that I used to mow. But, last year, I saw how nice it looked in the autumn, so I decided not to mow this year. Instead, I bought some wild flower seeds and threw them into the area.

This is a video of the area in the fall.

This is how the area looked a week ago – pretty ragged. But, if you look closely, you can see some wild flowers. I’m going to let it go wild this year and video it again in the fall.

But, unfortunately, the grass was becoming so high – about 1 ½ feet high – that I had to mow. I left as many wild flowers as I could, but if the grass got any higher, I would not have been able to cut it.

This is what the area looks like now.

Not too bad. Summer is coming, so soon this will all be brown. Have to enjoy it while you can.