by L. Shell Madden

Created on: June 11, 2008

City Boy Solutions

Several years back, my husband and I moved to a place he calls Halfway-to-the-Back-of-Beyond. It's four and a half acres, thirty-five minutes from the City, twenty minutes from Town, ten minutes from the Village and just barely within shouting distance of the nearest neighbour.
Since we moved in we've done an awful lot of things, but one thing for sure, we've kept the local farmers entertained.

It was our first summer in the house. Back then the front lawn was half the size it is now, but it was big enough for a gas powered lawn mower, which we dutifully purchased. Of course the lawn was just one of dozens of projects we undertook, which meant that while dry-stack limestone walls started to snake along the edges of our driveway, and garden beds were raised and tilled and planted, jobs were gone to and outside commitments tugged at us, the lawn developed a truly amazing number of dandelions.
If dandelions had been a cash crop, we would have been grinning from ear to ear. As it was, with rainy weekends and other projects they sort of got forgotten. Until one morning as I backed the car down the drive on my way to work, I realised the entire lawn was white and puffy I stopped, ran back to the house and quickly advised my husband of the situation, and the possible disastrous results if the seeds were allowed to take root, then headed off to work in the City.
That night on my way home, I stopped in the Village for milk and a couple of the local farmers were having a great chuckle about some city-kid and the latest thing he'd done, but I was in a hurry and didn't stay to listen to the details.
When I got home, the lawn was once more green, newly clipped and looking great. My husband was sitting on the front porch, beer in hand and a very smug look on his face.
We talked a moment, then he beamed at me and explained his ingenious solution to the dandelions. He'd brought home an old canister style vacuum cleaner from his part-time job at the local landfill, hoping to use it in the garage for the vehicles and such. But it was just too good a chance to pass up, so he pulled out his 250 foot extension cord, plugged in the vacuum and headed down the lawn
There he was, in shorts and flip-flops, standing on the lawn, vacuum in one hand, nozzle end in the other, vacuuming the heads off all the dandelions. It isn't any wonder the farmers were laughing-I nearly fell off my chair as he told me about it; even funnier was that for the rest of the year we had less dandelions then any of our neighbours.
Maybe city-boys aren't so dumb after all.
I should however addif you choose to try this rather unorthodox method of weed control, be prepared to be laughed at a lot and you'll need to buy a new vacuum for each crop of dandelions seems the fluff gets into the motors and tends to burn them out

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