The Green, Green Crabgrass of Home
It has been interesting moving into a neighborhood where most people really takes their lawn care seriously. In Columbia, the fact that I mowed my yard weekly made me a star pupil. Where I live now, I was getting by with a "D" and I was striving hard! God humbled me using lowly grass. There is a lot more to grass than I imagined. Like everything I am ignorant of, my lack of information made me blind to the complexity under my feet.
What has finally knocked me out of the ring of lawn care endeavors, was this summer's crabgrass. I deliberately avoided putting down pre-emergent to keep the crab grass from hatching because I wanted to embrace a more organic posture. Last year, doing so, didn't seem to cause a problem. This summer, from what I understand, was ideal for a crabgrass offensive...a lot of rain, a lot sun. Large sections of our yard fell like Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union at the end of WWII. I had a Yalta Yard and Communist Crabgrass.
At the height of the crabgrass offensive, I was working long hours and got diagnosed with Lyme's Disease. I really thought I might just have a coronary. Death sounded less dismaying than usual.
My wife and I decided to call the professionals. She was pretty insistent, as having a dusty plot of dirt rather than a yard, we surmised might reduce property value (after the first frost comes, the crabgrass dies...but its aftermath is a dead yard. Kind of like a house after the Frat moves out. Destruction remains after the chaos stops). There is an underlying subtle pecking order of the alpha yards in the hood reminiscent of the middle school lunch room table seating sequence. You have the cool yards, the so-so yards, and the dweeb yards. We were dweebing baby, getting our baloney sandwich stolen by the bully Big C-Grass.
The crabgrass is getting beat back....we did our landing at Inchon under both my efforts (I actually fought back effectively like a pee-wee who takes Karate lessons and breaks the bully's jaw) while marshaling the professional forces.
And, I am happy to announce that as of today, outside of mowing, we are officially delegating all lawn care to Scott's Lawncare. Here is the irony of it all. When you buy all the lawn treatments commercially and do the work yourself, the cost is not much less than if the company does it (they obviously have much lower costs on the products as it is in-house). Plus, they really have this cool aerating machine that looks like a Land Shark with rotating teeth. It leaves dog-sized looking doots of dirt in its churning wake.
I have struggled with the chemical treatment nature of this whole thing yet the organic solutions to killing crabgrass bordered on the ludicrous....spraying vinegar on it which kills everything including the healthy grass (but is organic) or sprinkling red pepper flakes on the crabgrass leaves like it was pizza. How about some Parmesan and oregano while I am at it?
A larger picture of how our priorities are all mixed up certainly could be up for discussion. We suburbanites are more concerned about our image "as successful" evidenced by our green yards. In a jury of our peers, we can point to our nice yards and say "See, I am somebody." But, we might not give a damn about suffering human beings who would benefit from our attention and benevolence. I doubt Jesus is going to care much about how green our yard was but I also don't think it is godly to not maintain the property. Too much neglect means that property values would fall and neighbors would effectively be stolen from by my super-spirituality. I don't have the right to do that. Do I?
What has finally knocked me out of the ring of lawn care endeavors, was this summer's crabgrass. I deliberately avoided putting down pre-emergent to keep the crab grass from hatching because I wanted to embrace a more organic posture. Last year, doing so, didn't seem to cause a problem. This summer, from what I understand, was ideal for a crabgrass offensive...a lot of rain, a lot sun. Large sections of our yard fell like Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union at the end of WWII. I had a Yalta Yard and Communist Crabgrass.
At the height of the crabgrass offensive, I was working long hours and got diagnosed with Lyme's Disease. I really thought I might just have a coronary. Death sounded less dismaying than usual.
My wife and I decided to call the professionals. She was pretty insistent, as having a dusty plot of dirt rather than a yard, we surmised might reduce property value (after the first frost comes, the crabgrass dies...but its aftermath is a dead yard. Kind of like a house after the Frat moves out. Destruction remains after the chaos stops). There is an underlying subtle pecking order of the alpha yards in the hood reminiscent of the middle school lunch room table seating sequence. You have the cool yards, the so-so yards, and the dweeb yards. We were dweebing baby, getting our baloney sandwich stolen by the bully Big C-Grass.
The crabgrass is getting beat back....we did our landing at Inchon under both my efforts (I actually fought back effectively like a pee-wee who takes Karate lessons and breaks the bully's jaw) while marshaling the professional forces.
And, I am happy to announce that as of today, outside of mowing, we are officially delegating all lawn care to Scott's Lawncare. Here is the irony of it all. When you buy all the lawn treatments commercially and do the work yourself, the cost is not much less than if the company does it (they obviously have much lower costs on the products as it is in-house). Plus, they really have this cool aerating machine that looks like a Land Shark with rotating teeth. It leaves dog-sized looking doots of dirt in its churning wake.
I have struggled with the chemical treatment nature of this whole thing yet the organic solutions to killing crabgrass bordered on the ludicrous....spraying vinegar on it which kills everything including the healthy grass (but is organic) or sprinkling red pepper flakes on the crabgrass leaves like it was pizza. How about some Parmesan and oregano while I am at it?
A larger picture of how our priorities are all mixed up certainly could be up for discussion. We suburbanites are more concerned about our image "as successful" evidenced by our green yards. In a jury of our peers, we can point to our nice yards and say "See, I am somebody." But, we might not give a damn about suffering human beings who would benefit from our attention and benevolence. I doubt Jesus is going to care much about how green our yard was but I also don't think it is godly to not maintain the property. Too much neglect means that property values would fall and neighbors would effectively be stolen from by my super-spirituality. I don't have the right to do that. Do I?
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