The Things We Do For A Nice Yard

My dad tells me that in my Grandpa Romrell's final years he became much like a pregnant woman in her final weeks of pregnancy. Some call it nesting. For old men it seems to be a need to leave the world and in particular their own property better than they found it. The catch is they don't have enough energy and are in too much pain to do it themselves. My Grandpa Romrell had my Uncle Leonard fixing things all around his house. It turns out my Dad is going through this nesting stage now that he has turned 89. And I am the lucky "right hand man" for my dad.

So there had been a lot of pruning going on. I have hauled off truckloads off it. At one point Dad even said, "I think things are looking pretty good around here. I don't think I see anything else we need to do. Since then we have done more pruning and I have more truck loads that still need to be hauled off. We have learned that the juniper bushes are more like weeds. They have overtaken the yard. The ones in the back where getting a lot of crab grass growing up in them. So we cut them back so Dad would be able to mow around them easier. I think we ended up scalping them pretty good. But since this is their first pruning in twenty years, I am pretty sure it will be the last time I ever prune them.

One dad at the end of July I was downstairs getting something and noticed that the water pump was running even though the sprinkler system wasn't on. This is generally a sign that a valve is stuck open. We had just had one fixed and I thought it must be another bad one. So I turned the main water line off and the electric box that runs the pump started shaking like it was going to blow up. So I hurried and turned off the breaker. This left Mom and Dad without any water for a few hours. But luckily Mike Denning came that night and fixed it.

The next morning I was looking out the back window and saw this bump in the lawn!

Evidently we had a break in a sprinkler pipe and that is why the pump was running non stop. I called our sprinkler guy to come fix it, but after a few days I hadn't heard back from him. My dad won't tolerate a brown lawn. So he went out with the probe and watched while I turned the water on to see exactly where it was coming from.

Luckily we only had to dig up about a three foot length of lawn to find that there was a coupler where a faucet had been at one time that had come loose. So the 1 1/2" pipe was just blowing out water full blast. Just as I made the final repair our sprinkler guy walked across the lawn. "Oh, I see you have a lawn tumor." Well thanks for giving me the "official" diagnosis.

In my own yard we have these beautiful trees that line our front yard. I never really even thought about what kind of trees they were. Well after four years of living in Parker it became very clear that they are Cottonwood trees.

I don't know if it is because of the wet spring we have had, but they have just been absolutely loaded! They actually look kind of pretty, until the cotton hits the ground.

It kind of looks like you have been toilet papered. But then when you mow over them, it looks like it has snowed in July!