May

31

Lawn maintenance.

Filed Under Personal | Leave a Comment

One of the aspects of owning a single-family house is figuring out what to do with all the land that surrounds the building. Or, in the case of those houses with sheds, detatched garages, or mother-in-laws, buildings. The vast majority of homeowners, when the decision was most pressing, chose to fill a significant portion of the property with grass. With a lawn. And most subsequent homeowners declined to radically deviate from the now-standard grass-centric approach to landscaping.

When D and I purchased our first house last summer, we were left with a choice: leave the lawn essentially in tact, tear it up and replace it with other landscaping immediately. Being not exactly flush, what with having to deal with all the costs associated with new home ownership, and what with plants being, well, expensive, we opted for the third way: retire the lawn slowly over time.

Which left us with a choice as to what to do with the lawn in the mean time. Naturally, not being insane, we gravitated away from plug-in electric lawnmowers. Again, having not hit the lottery lately, we opted away from the rechargeables. But we were disinclined to go with fossil fuels as well, aggravated that the sorts of technologies that make automobiles relatively low polluters don’t seem to have been adopted by the lawnmower industry.

And so we went with a reel mower. Human power. Which works great if you (1) live somewhere relatively dry, where the grass doesn’t grow meters per year, (2) are on-the-ball enough to mow regularly, and (3) have worked out the issue of weeds, with chemicals or sweat or indifference or otherwise. Seeing how (1) Olympia is not dry, (2) I am lazy and not easily motivated by the frowns of neighbors, and (3) our dandelions and hairy cats’ ears are prolific and hardy motherfuckers that don’t respond to anything short of a combination of Round-Up and napalm, I should have known the reel mower wasn’t going to work out. Nevertheless, I kept at it for almost a year before breaking down a few weeks ago and purchasing (gasp!) a gas-powered mower. Leaving the lawn looking, well, better than before. Improvement!


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