Madeline's Castle!: Mowing Adventures

My parents are awesome and surprised us with a new lawn mower when we got home from Italy. I must admit that I have never actually mowed a lawn before. I tried to once when I was much younger and ended up crashing my parents riding mower into our fence ending my career. Therefore, I was really excited to use our push mower. Nate showed me how to get it going and then off I went. The front yard was pretty straight forward and I must say it looks quite all trimmed down. The backyard was a different story. As you could see from my last post, the side yard is quite overgrown. Nate and Tom had cleared out all the big stuff so theorectically I could go over the rest with the mower and mulch it all up. This worked really well until I got to this one section. All of the sudden my eyes started to uncontroablly water and my nose and throat started burning. This was quite overwhelming so I stopped and took a break. After things calmed down I tried again. Same thing! After getting things under control a second time I tried a different section. Once again the water works started up. At this point my head was completely overwhelmed so I went inside and took a shower to get whatever it was off me. While I was inside both Nate and Tom tried to mow the area but were bombarded with similar symptoms. We're not positive on what is causing this severe reaction but we think it may be the veins that have completely taken over that side of the yard.

We were able to make significan process on the yard despite the mowing setback. We were able to break apart about half of the cement around the pool. This went quickly as it was pretty thin and as you can see there had been some weird setteling leaving gaps between the cement and ground.

Nate and Tom also removed a lot of fencing near the driveway which really opens up the yard. Nate's Mom brought us some rasberry and blueberry plants which we planted where one of the fences used to reside.