“Chigger Weed”

That’s what Mrs. Fetched calls them, anyway. It’s growing wild in front of an azalea along the driveway. Each flower is about the size of a dime.

I noticed them this morning while weed-eating, and decided to get a picture instead of mowing them down — sometimes, I’ll take the bribe of flowers or berries that a weed offers. But I wailed on a lot of briars, grass sprouting here & there, and small pine trees (and I’ve pulled up hundreds of the little suckers). I also ran enough sticks through the chipper to supply our mulch needs for the forseeable future, and used the Mantis that we bought at a yard sale last week to uproot all the weeds in between the sunflower rows.

If you’ve never seen a Mantis, they’re a cool little gadget — basically, a mini-tiller powered by a two-smoke chain saw engine. I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and the way it bounces when it hits a rock is quite amusing. I got two feet of air once last night, chewing up the grass in a flower bed. It really does great when the dirt is soft, digs in and starts throwing rocks at you out the back. When it gets too much vegetation wrapped around the tines, I hang it in a tree and pull out the strings.

Here in the late afternoon, it’s too hot to work outside. I finally broke down and stuck the window air conditioner in the outbuilding.