Wet and very windy

The mist today was driven by a 30 mph breeze and seemed to penetrate our skin and the cold did not help at all.
But this is NNY and this type of weather is to be expected in May and early June. As a matter of fact the temperature right now is threatening 40 degrees F. Needless to day we get a bit edgy when the mercury dips below 40 as most of our plants are out doors and it is wet and very windy.

A recent customer, who also works at a local garden center reported they lost a lot of vegetable plants early in May when the weather was so iffy. Some of our Regal Geraniums are just rebounding and the German ivy still does not look up to par, all from the same cold spell.

Our biggest problem right now is the grass which continues to grow even when the weather is too hot or too wet to mow. The gravely is still out of service so we do the “lets follow the push mower all over the place” routine. The whole thing start to finish takes about 2 hours but seems like much more. Come to think about it that’s a fairly long walk. At about 3 mph that would be 6 miles although some of it is backwards. Not sure if we should subtract the backwards part.

The gravely will do the whole thing in about 1 hour because it goes faster and has a wider swath. Problem is we removed the deck when we rebuilt the transmission and something did not get attached correctly when the deck went back on. The trans works great.

When we got the mower 3rd and 5th gears did not work. The problem was the gear selectors, or dogs as we transmission specialists call them, had worn surfaces but we solved that problem with new parts.

Transmissions are fascinating with all the gears and let me tell you some of them are razor sharp as I found out. We dumped all the parts into a vat of kerosene and cleaned them up. After some trial, and the peerless transmission book as a guide, we had the whole thing up and running with all gears functioning perfectly. But the mower deck continues to vex us.

Not for long thought as we now have room enough to bring the mower into the garage and make the adjustments. That is now that the porch window boxes are finished. Pictures to follow as soon as they are painted.