Mowing-season begins

And so the mowing-season begins. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

And so the mad mowing-season begins.
....When I torridly try to keep up with my huge and prolific lawn.
I can’t mow the entire yard in one sitting.
It’s too large. (I mow about three acres.)
Even with my gigantic 48-inch zero-turn lawnmower (above), the whole yard might take 3-4 hours.
And that’s without blowing the cuttings, running my mower back over what I had cut to blow the cutting-clumps to mulch.
Doing so adds to mowing.
I mow by sections. I have my yard divided into five sections.
I might do a section or two, and so burn about 2-3 hours.
Including going back over to mulch the clumps.
May is the worst month. That’s when my lawn is most productive.
Some sections have to get mowed twice a week, like my immediate front-yard, which grows like gangbusters.
By July my lawn is drying out. My entire lawn is down to about every 8-12 days. I have to raise the cutting-height.
Last year was terrible.
Mowing-season began about the time my wife died, and my mower promptly went sour.
I had to jump-start it with my car just to get it lit.
And of course this was happening during May, when my lawn was most prolific.
The starting decompression thingy wasn’t working. That was at least a week without my mower while it was being repaired.
I might have even farmed out my lawn-mowing, but I don’t remember.
So here was my poor mower-man parrying the complete wreck I was after my wife died, with a defective mower at the height of the mowing season.
The mower also broke a belt. I had to replace the super-long cutter belt, about 10 feet, $80. It went from the engine in the rear to the mowing-deck up front.
Not as much insanity yesterday.
The grass stalled my mower once, and threw the cutting-belt.
Rethreading it, I saw it was slightly damaged.
Who knows if it will let me mow what needs to be mowed.
It will need replacing sooner-or-later.
But at least it started normally, and wasn’t throwing the belt with every engagement like last year.
Some of the grass I cut was exceedingly high, at least a foot.
I look outside, and that’s what I have to look forward to the next seven months.
And the whole time I’m dodging rain. I have to look at weather-radar on this ‘pyooter to see if I can mow.

• A “zero-turn” lawnmower is a special design with separate drives to each drive-wheel, so it can be spun on a dime. “Zero-turns” are becoming the norm, because they cut mowing time in half compared to a lawn-tractor, which has to be set up for each mowing-pass.
• My beloved wife of over 44 years died of cancer April 17th, 2012. At the time she was 68. I’m now 69.
• “‘Pyooter” is computer.
• I mowed again today (Monday, April 29th, 2013) without incident; about two hours and about 1&1/2 acres.