03/13/13

Even though the the nice weather from this weekend is gone, and temperatures have cooled down considerably, I was still able to get outside today and be productive.

I went out at lunch to finish spreading the gravel I bought yesterday. There is an area at the corner of the driveway and parking area that had a low spot and was holding water. A while back I added some dirt to fill in the low spot. Unfortunately, however, the spot gets driven over a lot when people turn, such as delivery drivers, so it had some ruts in it. I evened it out today, then used the tamper to compact the soil. Once that was done I covered it was a layer of gravel, and then compacted again. I'm hoping that this will be enough to stand up to people driving over it.

I was't really motivated to go back out after work, but I convinced myself to do so. Since the temperature had dropped into the 30s I didn't really want to do much physical work, so decided that doing some mowing would be a good choice. Since the mower had been sitting all winter I had to do a bit of work, including airing up the tires and fiddling with it a bit to get it to run. Once that as done I hooked to it with the RTV and pulled it across the road, where there are still several areas that need additional clearing.

Once I had the mower where I wanted it I unhooked, and then hooked it to the front hitch on the RTV. This allowed me to back the mower into places that I couldn't have pulled it through. I've done something similar before, with the mower hooked to the back, but that requires driving in reverse, which I find is more difficult than backing the mower up while driving the RTV forwards.

I made significant progress, although it was slow work. I was able to do quite a bit of clearing around the edges that I had not been able to do before. I also was able to knock out some large sections of briars. I'll need to pull up some small pushes and cut down a few small trees to be able to make more progress. I'm hoping I may be able to do that tomorrow if the weather cooperates. My goal is to eventually be able to get the tractor over there, which will make clearing some of the larger brush easier.