The Culprit? and a Surprise

The primary focus of my day was the lawnmower. I am really, really tired of working on lawnmowers. And I don't have this problem solved yet.

This is the PTO switch. You pull it up to make the blades rotate. It may be bad. Or not. It's a likely suspect. Just getting it out of the mower was an education (because I've never done this or seen it done before, but I figured it out). I watched videos of how to test it with a multimeter to see if it has gone bad. Hmmm. This switch has 6 prongs, and all the newer ones have 8. So, I'm not sure if I'm testing it correctly or not. There are no 6-prong replacements. They are all 8-prong with matching numbers. So that seems like it would be OK, but I'm not sure how it can be all right to add two prongs. The socket has 9 slots so it would fit. 6.8.9. Seems a bit random to me.

I may have to get someone who knows more about this than I do. If it's not the switch or just wires, it's the solenoid. I haven't even found where the solenoid is yet. The old mower just had a lever which mecanically engaged the belts to drive the blades.

The surprise? Well, despite how many times I've declared that I'm done trying to keep a flower garden here with the lousy soil and too many hungry critters, each year I can't seem to stop myself from playing in the dirt.

So, I'm cleaning out the flower bed in front of the house. This little ground cover is sometimes called Creeping Charlie. (Several other plants are also called that.) This is Glechoma hederacea. It often grows wild in lawns. It's supposed to be a nuisance plant that forms dense mounds. Ha! All it's ever done in my gardens is creep all over, one skinny tentacle at a time, never looking nice. I'd be thrilled to see a dense mound of it.

But the surprise is that it bloomed this year. I don't think I've ever seen the blossoms- on my plants, anyway. It's a member of the mint family, and has a nice spicy scent when crushed.

Another surprise is that there are a few plants in my front garden that are still alive. So there is potentially a reason to weed that bed.

A final suprise wasn't so great. There is a patch of moss phlox growing in the yard, and I thought I'd dig it up and plop it into a space in that "lost" rock garden. I put in the shovel and pulled up a clod of dirt. Instantly there were about 5 biting ants on my hands. Ugh. Guess I'll leave that alone for a while!

Anyway, I did do several things I was supposed to today, even if I can't say that anything is done.

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