I Try To Keep This Complaint To Once A Year ...

... but it bears repeating at least once a year.

I hate yard work. I've been completing the latest "mowing" of about 40% of my yard the last couple of days.

Only 40% because the back part, which used to be "wooded," and which I could never really keep up with anyway, is now full of the detritus from my landlord deciding to get rid of all the pines. than 90% of the trees (there were about 120, now there are maybe 10 if you count infant mimosas) disappeared, but not really. There are some unground stumps, lots of small limbs just left on the ground, etc. I'm not going to even try. I wouldn't try if I had a large tractor and a brush hog. A push mower and string trimmer? Nope.

"Mowing" in quotes because it really is mostly "weedeater" work. There are so many little stumps for a mower to damage itself on, so many divots from the heavy equipment used to eliminate those trees, etc. that in most areas it's easier to just walk back and forth with the string trimmer. Cheaper, too (I've ruined at least two cheap mowers in the last three years on those damn stumps, and still haven't found and removed all of them, mostly because I'm not interested in adding to my "yard work" work load).

When we buy a place out in the country, I picture something like this:

The bigger the lot the better, but definitely "wooded," with the house or trailer and outbuildings located in a clearing.

A fence enclosing a SMALL yard around the trailer and any outbuildings. Something I can mow in, say, 15 minutes. Something big enough to give a dog a little roaming room. Something big enough to stick one of those gazebo thingies in for outdoor morning coffee or afternoon grilling/lunch.

The rest -- jungle, except POSSIBLY for a "walking trail" loop that I mow/trim, or pay someone to brush hog, a couple of times a year.

Anyway, the yard is cut. It took a couple of hours a day for three days because I had got lazy and let it go so some of it was slow going and because I spent some time raking/picking up detritus from the landlord's most recent tree murder spree (cutting long limbs off some 200-year-old oaks). For the rest of the "mowing season," which here in north Florida basically starts in March and runs into (at least) October, my plan is to just spend 10-15 minutes a day on it every day as "exercise," which should mean the whole thing gets cut every week or ten days.

Again: I hate yard work. My kids are too old to need a yard to throw a ball in, so it's just wasted time to comply with landlord / local government demands.