It cost me $7.00 in gas to mow the lawn!!! The gas prices are outrageous. Being that we are personal finance bloggers, we should try to come up with a plan to have an impact on these gas prices. We are bloggers after all, with the ability to spread the word in real time and become viral just by linking to each other's blogs and/or creating a trackback!
I have received an email that gives specific instructions to create an impact by not shopping at Exxon and Mobil. Being a Christian, I feel bad doing that because it may financially impact a person in a destructive manner. The oil companies are the villains here, not the neighborhood gas station owners or are they?
Besides the obvious choices of maintaining your car and car pooling, what else is there?
We can:
1. Limit the times we leave the house. Except for people like me that live in the middle of nowhere that need to drive 20-25 minutes just to get to a supermarket, it won't work. With 7 kids, there is always an appointment, little league and grocery runs.
2. Pull out your bike and/or your running shoes and walk.
3. Schedule all your errands on the same day.
That doesn't solve the problem of $7.00 in gas to mow the lawn though? It's two acres of land, too much to use a push mower...
Shhould I live in a forest this summer and risk getting fined for not maintaining the property? That's ludicrous! There are also the problems of the rabbits that will make little tunnels close to the ground to have their litters and the deers with their deer ticks. Oh, the black bear population seems to have boomed this year... Having overgrown shrubs would contribute to these issues.
Let's brainstorm and make some impact on this gas situation and fast!!!
4 comments:
If you have two acres of lawn, maybe consider getting a goat or two.
That's pretty funny! Maybe, I should bring the cows and horses from down the road to my property and let them deal with it....then again there's the stinky manure!!!
LOL!
I've seriously asked the woman who boards her horses here at my place to groom them on the lawn....letting them eat their fill. I'll mow the pieces by the front of the house with a push mower & she can use her automatic 4 legged mowers on the rest of the place. Mowing used to be one of my pleasures.........but not at these prices!!!
Horses would be a better choice than goats and sheep. Goats and sheep both nibble right down to the roots, plus goats, particularly, are likely to take out any ornamental shrubbery. They don't just stick to grass. They also are not always bright enough not to eat poisonous plants.
One idea would be to carefully groom a small portion (1/4-1/2 acre or so) of lawn around the house and then make the rest not-lawn -- you could use a combination of groundcover like ivy, mulched beds with flowers, trees, shrubbery, anything but grass.
Another would be to get a reel mower (the kind of mower that doesn't have an engine) and just do a small portion each day. Say you have to mow every two weeks -- if you do 1/10th of the 2 acres every weekday, that gets done, and it's less than 1/4 acre each time. You could delegate this to one or more of the kids if they are old enough, or just consider it your aerobic workout for the day.
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