Back in July, I published ”Winter of my discontent”, a post in which I said something I can’t remember mentioning before—that I hate winter. I also listed some of the challenges that I’ve faced this year, and all of those are still true, but now there’s another to add to the list: Taking care of my lawns.
I took the photo up top early afternoon on August 1. It shows part of the “lawn” nearest my patio, and how the water was beaded up on the leaves. It’s like that many days in winter.
As I often mention, it rains a lot in winter in the upper North Island, and this year my part of the country is at or above normal rainfall for the season. What this means in practice is that the lawns never truly dry out, and that makes mowing a real challenge. As I said back on June 7:
Mowing… is much harder when there’s been rain, especially when the grass is long, because moisture stays close to the ground for a long time. That makes the lawn much denser than it is when dry, and that can stall the mower if I’m not careful. [emphasis in the original]My battery-powered mower simply doesn’t have enough power to deal with dense, wet lawns, though some newer models (and other brands) of battery-powered mowers have less problem with that, and petrol-powered mowers manage it pretty well. The past two winters were both much milder, and so I tried to wait two days after rain to let the lawns dry out a bit, but in a winter with at least normal rainfall, like this year, that’s just not an option. There may be no more than one day—or merely part of one—with no rain, and that means the lawns never actually dry out.
This is one of the reasons that nearly two months passed since I last mowed the lawns, however, the other reason is a benefit of winter this year: It’s been cold, and the grass grows very slowly (if at all) when the temperature is low. We started getting very cold (freezing or below) nighttime temperatures back in May, which is unusual. Since then, even the daytime temperatures have often been quite cool or even cold, meaning slow-growing grass. That was a very good thing because it meant I didn’t need to mow the lawns as often as in milder weather—until I did.
By this month, the lawns were getting quite long, the back in particular (which is obvious to me in the photo), and the edges of both needed to be done, too. Tuesday of last week, I finally mowed the front lawn and side yard, including using the line trimmer on the edges. The next day, I finished the back lawn and edges.
There’s a reason I always do the side yard before the rest of the back lawn, especially in winter: I know there won’t be much charge left in the battery, and if I don’t finish the entire back lawn right away, I won’t see a half-done lawn when I look out the windows. An additional benefit is that the shorter grass makes it easier for me to get my rubbish and recycling wheelie bins out of the side yard.
There’s one more aspect to all this, one that is also worse in winter: The lawn mower’s battery itself. My mower’s manufacturer says to store batteries part-charged, which they say extends battery life. However, I’ve read elsewhere that doing that minimises the chance of thermal runaway, explosion, and fire that lithium batteries are notorious for. That’s not a big issue by itself, but it means that tight planning is essential because I need to charge the battery before I can use it, something I try to do using solar power, and daylight hours are short in winter. I managed, obviously.
Thursday of last week, the day after I finished the mowing, the rain returned, and it’s been rainy at least part of every day since. A major weather system moved through the area over the weekend and into today, dumping lots of rain, giving some strong winds, and today we even got some thunder. Still, we had a sunny morning today, so I was able to run my dishwasher using only solar power, something that helps to keep my higher winter power charges somewhat less than they’d otherwise be. Nevertheless, the cold and rainy weather continues to give me challenges (not even talking about comfort), and back in July I talked about what I do:
To cope with that, on the many days with no sunshine, I do power-hungry chores—like running the clothes dryer or dishwasher—after 10pm when the electricity rates are lowest. When I can, I wait until a sunny day to do those sorts of chores so I have free electricity, but that’s not always possible—especially when we have the better part of two weeks with nothing but cloudy or rainy days.In that same post I mentioned pressing the “boost” button on the device that prioritises sending my solar electricity production (if any…) to the hot water cylinder, and how it was only the second time I’d ever had to do that. Since that July post, I’ve had to do that two more times—and almost did it for a fourth time last night, but didn’t (the sunny morning today made that unnecessary).
All of this added together—the huge amount of rainy, or at least cloudy, days this winter, plus the cold temperatures at night, have made this winter the worst I’ve experienced in years, and it’s definitely the worst I’ve experienced since I moved to Kirikiriroa-Hamilton. I struggled to get the lawns mowed, I needed to boost my hot water cylinder three times (so far…), and I’m often cold, especially in the evening.
Still, it’s not been all bad: That grass I struggled to mow grew more slowly because of the cold, and yesterday when I vacuumed the heat pump filters, they weren’t bad at all, which surprised me considering how much they’ve been running every day and night.
Winter’s been a very mixed bag this year (and more bad than good), but the hopeful thing is that in two weeks we’ll have just started Spring. I wouldn’t mind a warmer- and drier-than-usual Spring, but whatever it is, these winter woes are going to end—eventually. That’s a very good thing.
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