I planted a mix of butterfly and hummingbird friendly plant seeds in the front yard garden last year, and in the past few months, one of the plants has started shooting up. It’s over eight feet tall with clusters of tight green buds. I wonder what the flowers will look like when they open.

This picture is from last summer.

The Path to Freedom online store, Peddler’s Wagon, is selling these stainless steel little two-compartment lunch boxes. I got mine this week, and am loving it. Here it is unpacked:

Lunch box unpacked (with purple Easter egg)

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Cross-posted at Eye Level Pasadena

We’re looking for ways to conserve money around our house, so I decided to start mowing the lawn myself. I have fond memories of my dad mowing the lawn with a push mower on Saturdays when I was growing up, and also I remembered some of Roger’s posts at Easy Green about how much pollution gas-powered lawn mowers can emit, so I knew I wanted a manual push mower.

These websites helped me figure out what exactly I wanted:

• People Powered Machines: Which Manual Push Reel Mower is Right for You?
• Epinions.com: Reel Mowers
• Reelmowerguide.com: Guide to choosing and using a manual reel mower

We have some St. Augustine grass, so a Brill would have been too lightweight for us. I decided on the Scotts 20-inch manual reel mower without the grass catcher. (Grass clippings are good for the lawn and I’d heard that the grasscatcher didn’t actually fit this mower all that well.) I assembled the handle Friday night while I was watching a movie, and I went outside in the dark with Gavin holding a flashlight so I could test it out as soon as the movie was over. It was solid and easy to push and a little addictive. I finished half of our front lawn by flashlight because it was so satisfying. Saturday morning I got up early to finish the rest of the front and all of the back. I’m pretty out of shape, but even so it was just a light workout. The blades are quiet enough that I can mow without worrying about waking up the neighbors. I could hear birds chirping. It felt good to be outside in the early morning pushing the lawn mower around, watching the grass clippings fly and listening to the birds.

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Cross-posted at Eye Level Pasadena.