Dandelions and Bees

“Good heavens! I’ve got to get out there and cut the grass!” I said to my husband. “This is ridiculous, it’s getting way too long.”

“Wait” he said, “you have to wait a little longer....for the dandelions....you can’t cut the dandelions, not yet.”

I must to be one of the few women out there whose mate is intent on preserving dandelions on the lawn. He wants to make sure I don’t cut them down and wishes we had more of them! Why? It’s the bees. Dandelions are one of their first foods after emerging from the hive in the spring. 

It does seem pretty precarious for the bees in May. The slowly arriving spring isn’t quick to provide them with an abundance of food. We even observed the bees searching for nectar on the sawdust and newly split firewood from a recently bucked aspen tree our beavers fell for us. They must have been drawn to the sweet sap in the freshly fallen tree. We do give them a needed boost by providing them with sugar water and pollen patties, but, like deciding when to wean a bottle lamb, you eventually have to stop feeding them and let them forage for themselves. It’s the withdrawal of the sugar water that prompted the obsession with dandelions.

Our sheep graze our lawn every morning. This is a great way to clip (and fertilize) the grass that I’m not allowed to mow because of the dandelions and the bees. The flock looks beautiful out there. I love looking at the moms with their little lambs and never tire of watching our majestic guardian dogs, Loki and Thor, trotting along with them. But this worked a lot better when we had over a hundred sheep with their lambs. Now we don’t have enough sheep to trim the grass to a nice comfortable length (defined by me as short enough to walk through in the early morning dew without getting your pant legs soaked). There’s also the problem of taste. Some grasses apparently taste better than others and the not-so-yummy ones get passed by giving the lawn a shaggy hummocky appearance. Really, I’m not super fussy, but a ragged lawn upsets my sense of balance somehow, like a crooked painting, it just puts me off. I really was getting anxious to cut the grass.

We would drive down the road and see fields riddled with dandelions, some so full it looked like they were the planted crop.  “I just don’t understand it! Why don’t we have more dandelions?” my husband would lament. “Did you see that? They’re everywhere except our place!” 

It turns out our dandelions were a bit later to bloom, maybe because we’re surrounded by bush. Our apple tree was later to bloom as well. But still, we do seem to have a nearly dandelion-less lawn. I don’t know why for certain. I have certainly made no effort for this to be, but I do have a suspicion as to the cause. I was watching the sheep out the kitchen window at breakfast one day while they were grazing away on our over-long lawn. Along came a ewe, munching away, passing up the grass and moving from dandelion to dandelion, daintily clipping off each scrumptious yellow flower one by one. I felt compelled to point this out to my husband. “No wonder,” I said, “they’re a sheep treat! We’ll never get any dandelions for the bees if the sheep are going to eat them - I guess I may as well cut the lawn today.”

“Not yet,” my husband said.

I finally was allowed to cut the grass. I bargained by limiting the area I would cut, leaving a large section to the west of the house for the sheep and the dandelions. After I cut the grass the dandelions seemed to multiply. And the second time I cut it I swear they ducked when the mower came by, then shot straight up a couple days later to air their puffy seed heads in the wind and ensure their survival for next year. Now it’s mid June and it’s rain that keeps me from cutting grass. The dandelions and the bees are doing fine.

mltipton.blogspot.com , https://www.facebook.com/Northof543/, June 17, 2019

Old Stuff

Last month while doing my laundry a large puddle began to spread silently across the floor. I, of course, reacted in my usual manner to unforeseen catastrophes, I hollered for my husband. So he performed his normal hard water maintenance routine to descale bits and pieces of the machine, looked at everything he could get at to see if he could find the leak - all to no avail. We called the repair guy, figured out it would probably take two trips out to our farm, one to find the problem, the other to bring the parts to fix it, and between mileage and hourly rates it was looking costly. So we started inquiring about new machines. We truly wanted to shop local but we could not afford local prices, so off to the city we went. One good thing, we ran into a “no interest for 18 months” deal, so we can pay our new washer off bit by bit. They make it extremely easy to spend money you don’t have these days! 

We had to replace our mattress about a year ago. My aching back was causing me to sleep on our recliner most of the night. A couple days ago the mechanism on our love-seat recliner broke, for about the third time. Previously that handy man of mine welded something together and made it work again - not this time. Tears in the upholstery have been patched with glued on leather, now there’s tears next to the patches. We’ve been on-line browsing to replace it, also our ratty couch that we bought over 25 years ago. Another large expenditure, in many ways expected but largely ignored by putting it off for years.

I could gripe about planned obsolescence, which is, I think, very real, but I have to say we’ve gotten good use out of most of our household appliances and furniture. Nothing lasts forever. As you age, so does your stuff!

Food, shelter and clothing - the basic necessities of life. Really? There’s a lot more to it than that. There’s tons of stuff you need, or think you need, or have become accustomed to, that may not make it through your retirement years. Even if you think you’ve planned for every possible twist and turn of events, you may eventually have to get inventive to find the dollars to keep all the stuff you own functioning and in good shape. Yesterday we saved a few dollars by grooming my dog at home. He was beginning to look like a mop and collecting debris by the pound every time he went outside. Ted didn’t appreciate our fur snipping, toenail clipping and bathing operation, but doesn’t he look fine now?