Help me! I just killed my lawn
I made a momentous decision this week, and one that some of you
might find strange.
I have decided to do away with my lawn.
Help me! I just killed my lawn
I made a momentous decision this week, and one that some of you might find strange.
I have decided to do away with my lawn.
Now I’m sure you’re saying to yourselves: “Get rid of a lawn? How could she? Isn’t it protected in the Constitution or something?”
Lawns are pretty ubiquitious throughout the United States, and let’s face it, most of the time they’re a pain in the rear. Most of the time to get them to look thick and green and pretty, you have to pour noxious chemicals upon them, clip them just so, and water a lot.
Let’s face it – all this work for a little patch of green tends to interfere with the things I’d rather be doing.
I finally got to the end of my rope this week after more than 20 years of trying to grow a lawn in front of my house. I live in Aromas, and depending where you live in Aromas, you either have the most wonderful soil (near the Pajaro River) or the lousiest (where I live, up in the hills).
My soil appears to be lumps of clay occasionally punctuated with gophers. That makes it hard to actually grow anything in it.
So I have struggled mightily with this lawn, lo, these many years. It did serve a purpose, once upon a time when my boys were little. They liked to play on the lawn and pitch tents on it. I think there was one or two nights they slept out there.
But that was a long time ago, and they have no interest in lawns now.
We dug up the original lawn, put down new sod and tried again about 10 years ago. It looked good for about a year. Then the gophers took over, accompanied by their little friends, the moles.
I refuse to put any weedkillers on it, out of respect for the environment, and the result has been a lot of weeds. Which I should be pulling by hand, but don’t have time to. I do fertilize (sometimes) and I water (when I remember to).
The result, as you might imagine, is sort of a patchwork-looking thing made up of dandelions, crab grass, a few actual pieces of lawn, bare spots and gopher mounds. Every once in a while, there is a lovely surprise, like the pumpkin that sprouted in the middle of it all. But the gophers got it, too.
This year, the lawn was having a particularly bad time of it. The cats, who over the past few years, had killed a few vermin now and then, decided to take a vacation from their job. The bare spots grew, and so did the number of gopher mounds.
Then the dog got into the act and started digging for gophers. Digging quite deep, and doing a really good job on those holes, but without finding any gophers.
I couldn’t deal with the whole dog-gopher dynamic, seeing as I was attempting to launch my eldest son in the direction of college, and so the holes got bigger and more impressive.
Over the weekend, after Ross was off to UCSC, I started looking at the darn lawn and thinking, I really don’t need this aggravation.
I’m now looking at lawn alternatives. Yes, they do exist.
It’s funny, though, looking at pictures of lawnless yards. They look perfectly fine in Sunset magazine or whatever, but I just can’t see my yard without a lawn. Not yet, anyway.
I’ll just have to keep working at it.
