It doesn’t take much gardening to plant zucchini, pumpkins, squash and melons. Once they get ahead of the surrounding vegetation they shade out the competition and provide their own mulch. Climbing beans and cucumbers against the fences are easy too. Maybe your wife could help with a garden too – why not ask her if she’d like to?

The front needed a cut again last night. So while my wife was rocking our son to sleep on the front porch, I whipped out the mower and cut the front yard. It didn’t take long, I wasn’t sore afterward, and the noise didn’t bother him in the least.

I think some of my neighbors think I’m nuts, and they’re probably right, but not because of my lawnmower.

No gardening anymore. I’ll probably take it up again at some point but with working 6 days a week there just isn’t time for it. My back yard grows a lot more slowly than the front so I may be able to get away with the reel mower out there, at least until I can either coax the Toro into running or find an honest shop to get it going again.

Well, I can remember doing my grandparent’s front lawn this way, way back when. It’s doable, IF the lawn is relatively small, and the back yard is devoted to vegetable gardens; small fruit (brambles, currants, strawberries); melons, zuccini, squash and pumpkins; fruit trees; and maybe flower gardens as well – and a small courtyard and barbecue area to sit and enjoy it all. But zero to minimal lawn. My grandparent’s was. Yours is as well, isn’t it, Dave?

Of course, the more gardens you have out the front, the less mowing, as well. You can get some mighty ornamental plants that are edible as well, too. Rainbow chard and kale, chilli peppers, nasturtiums, edible celosia (*censored*scomb), day lilies, grain sorghum (foliage isn’t safely edible, but the plant with seeds is ornamental, and you or the birds or the squirrels will benefit from the seeds), some of those zuccini, many more.