Is that grass back there?

Well the day has come that all of my neighbours have been anxiously waiting for - I finally mowed my lawn!  The thing about living here is that we all live in these really old, brick row houses and while each unit is generally separated by fences and you can't really see laterally into your neighbours yard, you can definitely see into your neighbours yard from your first floor (which to us Canadians is really the 2nd floor but they call 1st floor the ground floor or 0 - don't get me started!) So needless to say, I am pretty sure that all of my neighbours have been wondering when the hell I was going to finally mow my lawn!  My one neighbour, Martin, who I literally bumped into in the kitchen in our office in Beijing, 2 weeks ago - weird, popped his head out of the 2nd floor/1st floor window and made a comment :-)

It is hard to believe that a little patch of grass this small, can produce 2 1/2 bags of lawn clippings.  Mind you, when it is already June 10 and you haven't mowed the lawn once yet this season and it has rained a lot and the grass is up to your mid-calf, then I guess you would expect as much!  LOL!

Seriously though, it took me a good 45 minutes to mow my lawn and you will see, it is not that big!  My landlord left me with a little gutless wonder of an electric lawnmower.  Seriously, this thing has no juice whatsoever and I wish that I would have brought over my nice gas mower with me - something with some power!  And what had been holding me up mowing my lawn was that I needed an extension cord, or a "garden cord" as the guy at the hardware store called it.  I was finally able to buy one this weekend and today was the magical day of use!

No my grass isn't dead, but I think it was being choked out by this fern-type of thing growing it it and that is what was giving me this false sense of pride that I had green lawn.  After mowing it 3 times, yes 3 times, I noticed that it picked up all the nice green and I am now left with brown.  Nice.  So it looks like I will be finding the garden centre and picking up some fertilizer and giving it a little boost!  Yah, lawn maintenance isn't exactly my thing.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE a green lawn, but I want it to just happen.

I am also going to hire a gardener and come in and figure out what is what in my flower beds and hopefully get me all organized when it comes to that.  I can't see myself planting much this year, because I said it is already June 10 and I don't even know where the garden centre is!  And knowing this country, it is definitely not open past 5:30pm on a weeknight!

So the upside of all of this is that I actually have a back garden and a nice area to sit.

Oh by the way, yah, I am finally back in The Hague for more than 2 days so I should be back to my ol' bloggin' ways!