On Lawn Care

So I got my Ugly Velcro Boot^tm off last week, and thus today was able to mow the front lawn of The Estate.  This went very quickly since The Lovely Rhonda and our good friend Josh mowed last weekend; it was the first mow of the season and the grass was still a bit damp so it was an all-day affair.  It has been sunny for a couple of days now and there was only a week’s worth of growth so I barely cracked a sweat.

Our lawns are pretty standard, your basic grass with trees and shrubs here are there.  It used to have delightful berms and sunken areas planted with sumptuous flowering plants of various types, but this was before my tenure here.  By the time I came onto the scene, any interesting flora had long made tracks for someplace where they took better care of their grounds, and all that remained was an annoying hump and trough that defied mowing.  I am super lazy have no real patience for such bourgeois niceties as “landscaping” so I had the lawn guys we hired a couple years ago for Major Yard Cleanup scrape them off and fill them in, as applicable.  Now when I mow I no longer encounter mower-annihilating bumps and holes.

The scraped/filled areas have filled in with weedy clovery looking stuff.  This leads me to ponder the merits of enhancing my yard care regimen, which currently consists of mowing and occasionally, when I can be bothered to make the effort, watering.  Then I step back and look at the yard.  The clovery stuff a) is green, and b) resembles grass from a short distance.  My work here is done!

Each year that we have been here I have chosen a smallish area to fix up.  The flower beds along the front of the house are now planted with some perennials and the occasional annual and get some bark mulch every so often, and the left side of the house has a gravel strip to park the trash and recycling cans in.  The area that used to have a rotting smelly shed over it is slowly filling in with grass, probably not a groundskeeper-approved variety of grass but it fits my requirements (green, looks grass-like) so I’m not knocking it.

This year I think the chosen bed will be the right side of the house.  There are a couple of scraggly, hideous rhododendrons against the house that have outlived their welcomes, and toward the fence side there’s a weedy corner of blackberries and creeping vetch and the like.  I’m not sure what I’ll do there, since it doesn’t get a lot of sun and there’s a disreputable cherry tree looming over everything dropping its blighted wormy fruits all over the place, but I’m sure it will involve hard work and digging and bitching and complaining and Motrin.

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