For the first two summers owning the Thrifty warehouse, I hired a local man to take care of mowing our plain grass lot. Now that we've settled into the new building, I've decided to take on the additional work of doing the mowing and some slow landscaping myself. Doing the yard work for the business provides a good weekly workout, a healthy dose of sunshine, and helps me keep an eye on the garden area.
However, I wasn't thrilled about the idea of using a gasoline mower. In addition to utilizing fossil fuels, the idea of storing a gasoline can and greasy mower engine in the warehouse with the fabric wasn't working for me. As an alternative to a gasoline mower, I chose to pick up the Ryobi battery powered system for landscaping. The Ryobi system includes a mower, trimmer, and blower, so all my bases are covered.
While I do my weekly landscaping, my husband and father-in-law have also been doing some repairs to the building. We get a lot of thunderstorms in Kansas and we had a door threshold that was leaking this year, so they shored it up for us. I also got a little bit of free yard work out of them since they wanted to test out the new electric tools.
Cherry Tree Update!
The cherry tree that was hit hard by the Japanese beetles has dropped all of her damaged leaves and started putting out new shoots. I've been giving her extra water and a bonus dose of magical rabbit manure to help speed along her recovery.
Tip: Wrap young tree trunks in strips of burlap and bind them with a natural fiber twine. This protects the tender bark from being damaged by mowing and weed eating. It can also deter rabbits from eating the bark in winter (though if they get desperate, they may chew through it). The burlap covering will naturally break down over time, so if you forget about it, no worries!
Next year I plan to keep a closer eye on things. Hopefully that Japanese Beetle attack was just a fluke due to the weather conditions this year. It always astonishes me how drastically the winter and spring weather impact fruit tree harvest - a frost at the wrong time can wipe out an entire cherry season. You just never know what's going to happen.
I also decided I was tired of weed eating up close to the tree trunks when I was doing yard work, so I put down some cardboard and threw a couple of bags of mulch under each tree. I pulled up all of the grass within 6" of the tree to keep it from poking up through the center hole along the trunk.
Tip: If you don't want to use plastic landscape cloth under your mulch, put down cardboard instead. It will require some occasional weeding, but if things get too overgrown you can add another layer of cardboard and mulch. It's all organic matter that will eventually break down into soil.
Progress is slow (especially in the summer heat), but I've got plans to do some fall planting once the weather turns.
Happy Sewing,
Liv