I just love to see everyone's lawn begin to turn green. When the trees are still bleak skeletons and even the early rising sunlight of forsythia hasn't appeared, those verdant stretches of velvet make one realize that spring is really here. Unfortunately the lawns on Low Cost Hill look more like burlap than velvet, bumpy and uneven and containing far more weeds than grass. Especially this year. By last August the lawns above and below the new retaining wall had been destroyed by the rubble of rocks that had been lying there all summer.
While Hank was off sailing I tackled the area above the retaining wall. It needed lots of fill, so I shoveled dirt into bucket after bucket from a pile created when the foundation for Bridget and John's little house was built. It was soil accumulated from years of rotting oak leaves and was horrendously acid, but I added some lime (obviously not enough), leveled the area and seeded it. It's now a lawn, but not exactly velvety as the weeds liked the acid soil a lot more than the grass seed did.
Hank tackled the area below the retaining wall, a more difficult job. Rocks and gravel had to be removed first, then manure put down and mixed into the soil with the rototiller. The manure was not sufficiently rotted so it ended up as black clumps the size of fifty-cent pieces pock-marking the lawn. These clumps were so dry that the grass seed couldn't get through them. Hank claims it will soon turn into a good-looking lawn, but I'm skeptical.
The lawn between the cellar door and the pond is also pathetic. The cellar drain became plugged up last summer, and Hank had to rent a baby backhoe to dig it up and replace it. What a mess! The drain was four feet down. When Hank finally found it and pulled it out we saw why it was plugged. A zillion roots from the silver maple had crept in through its holes. He replaced it with a pipe without holes, filled up the trench, then tried to replace the sods he'd carefully removed before digging the trench. What a lumpy lawn!
Putting in a new lawn is no easy job. Trying to protect its tender beginnings from dogs, children and weed seeds can be almost impossible. We're great "do-it-yourselfers," and besides saving money (definitely MY motive) we've gotten great satisfaction out of the hard work we've put into our projects, but the usual rewards just aren't there when it comes to making a lawn. I am thinking hard about buying some commercial turf.
Back in 1984 when we redid our pond it was November by the time we were ready to seed the sloping banks surrounding its edge. We could picture the erosion that would occur if we left them raw, but it was too late to expect grass to grow. With a turf farm only ten miles down the road, our solution was to buy "instant grass". It turned out to be a real bargain (about $1.75 a yard) as I was happy to take "seconds," the rolls that were less than six feet long.
Our poor pickup's rusty back end almost collapsed when the fork lift set down close to 1000 pounds of sod in it, but then, so did my own back after unloading all those rolls around the pond. Laying them out, however, was as easy as undoing a bedroll. We'd already prepared the area, adding lime and then raking, removing rocks and smoothing the soil. We set each roll of sod so it faced the right way and would fit snugly against the next, and then uncoiled it.
I don't think much of most "instant" products, be it coffee or TV dinners or sunlamp tans, but those rolls of ready-made grass we uncurled on the banks of the pond were fantastic. In the morning we had muddy raw banks sloping down to the water's edge. By afternoon a smooth new emerald lawn had replaced them. We felt like magicians as we admired our handiwork, and quickly decided commercial turf was a better investment than wall-to-wall carpeting. Where can you buy a rug for so little, impervious to red wine stains and cigarette burns?
A week later when I tried lifting a section, I found dozens of white roots already starting to reach down into their new home. There was only one slight drawback. This beautiful turf made our other lawns look positively shabby. Kentucky bluegrass, the seed variety usually used in commercial turf, is what I'd call the queen of grass seeds. It is nurtured with plenty of fertilizer while it's growing up, plus chemicals to prevent crabgrass and other broadleaved riffraff from taking over. It needs watering if Mother Nature doesn't provide enough rain.
It received all this pampering until it was moved to Low Cost Hill, where nothing gets much pampering. As a consequence, the queen started to die, attacked on all sides by dandelions and plantains and common field grasses. Within a few years the areas around the pond matched our other lawns. Of course most home owners aren't as lazy about lawn care as the Taylors. I'm sure the queen of grasses would reign for years and years for someone willing to nurture her properly.
I'm afraid lawns aren't a top priority on Locust Hill. I really admire the velvet lawns in front of the houses of friends and neighbors, but a dozen other garden chores will be keeping me busy for next few months.
