mowing is like vacuuming…

I don’t have many oppor­tu­ni­ties to mow the lawn. I’ve basi­cally told John that the day he can’t keep up with the grass will be the day I break into the Mon­santo fac­tory and abscond with all the Roundup they have and then apply it to the lawn. There’s lots of other ways I’d rather use the space.

The day has come. John had some work done on a foot and will be hob­bling around for a cou­ple months. The grass, how­ever, well-watered from the Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary rains, didn’t stop grow­ing, and it was time to have the con­ver­sa­tion.

Well, in the end, I’m embar­rassed to say that I caved, rea­son­ing that he should be back to push­ing the mower around in a few weeks, and now isn’t the best sea­son to think of plant­ing some­thing that will require water to keep it going through the dry sum­mer and fall ahead. Besides, John really likes his lit­tle patch of lawn, and he lets me have my way with most of the rest of the garden.

So I popped some allergy tablets and pulled out the elec­tric mower and headed for the patch of grass. Back and forth I went over the brown­ing green sur­face. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s weirdly med­i­ta­tive, like vac­u­um­ing, I decided, only with a device that can chop off your toes.

My diverse lawn

As I took down the seed heads it was a chance to look at this what we call a lawn. It’s never been a fanat­i­cally main­tained piece of green, and fea­tures lit­tle colonies of Saint Augus­tine, Bermuda, rye, clover and what­ever other species the wind has deliv­ered. The bio­log­i­cal diver­sity of this patch would do the Ama­zon proud and drive any single-species lawn fanatic to distraction.

The cat, last fall, shak­ing off the thatch from the lawn. This is inside the house, of course.

By mid-summer it’ll go mostly brown as we cut back on water­ing to con­tinue with our water con­ser­va­tion. At that point, fac­ing four to six months of brown, four to six months of thatch being tracked into the house every time you walk across the gar­den, that’ll be when we might con­tinue our dis­cus­sion with whether we might want to do some­thing else with this patch of prime gar­den real estate.

What­ever we decide, you can rest assured that we will not be installing the plas­tic turf that’s get­ting to be a pop­u­lar gar­den sur­face around town. In fact, I like that stuff so lit­tle I’ve started my very first Face­book group, Plas­tic Turf Must Die!!!!!! As far as I’m con­cerned far­dens are about life and grow­ing things, and this stuff is as dead and cheesy as any­thing out there. If you’re any sort of joiner and hate the stuff your­self, join the group!

March 31 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • | 7 Comments »