Mowing

Today is not a planting day, so today’s garden job is mowing. I always feel great after a mowing session. I call it “mowing meditation”, and it is such good exercise – aerobic, strength and flexibility all at once – and I so hate exercise for its own sake. This way I end up with a trailer load of organic matter for soil feeding, and a nicely mowed lawn at the community centre, at the same time.

This mowing will not make good mulch. It’s been so wet since Christmas that the lawn is filled with soft meadow weeds like cobblers pegs and dandelions, and the grass is knee high. There’s an old permaculture tale of using this kind of stuff to seal dams, but it has never worked for me. I think in Australia,  keeping water in is a whole nuther level of challenge. But if I just dump it in a pile, it will turn into a slimey, water repelling gel that looks like it could be used to seal at least a little dam.

It will, however, make great compost. I’ll layer it with a little bit of horse manure, not too much because it already has plenty of nitrogen, and the leaves, prunings, and carbon rich weeds we try to keep cleared to reduce the fire hazard. This multi-purposing every bit of work is so much a part of the beauty of permaculture. In a few weeks I’ll be using it to pot up seedlings, and a few weeks after that, I’ll (hopefully) be posting pictures of the product in a recipe post!

If you are into gardening at bigger than a courtyard bed scale, I’d seriously recommend finding a good patch of lawn that needs to be lawn, and taking up mowing for exercise.

If you’d like my compost making recipe, I’ve put an article about it on the Garden page.