Amazing thing about grass? You cut it, and it grows back
I have a growing problem outside my house.
We recently moved to a new area where our neighbors park their cars inside their garages and hire people to care for their lawns. We think we have a nice home, but I’m sure there are others who see us as the trailer trash of the neighborhood. Or at least they do after my “lawn care” incident.
Our new home came with a lawn made up of real grass. The man who lived in our home before us used his sophisticated, built-in sprinkler system to nurture his impressive lawn.
That put real pressure on me. At our old house, our small front lawn was sheltered by huge pines; the lawn grew slowly, if at all. Our backyard was a different story. It was really a celebration of evenly mowed weeds and moss that would have looked very much like grass if you had flown over it in a small airplane.
The previous owner of our new home suggested we might want to hire a local firm to come and fertilize and poison our yard. I know, I know – that might sound environmentally cruel, but I didn’t care. I could already see small clumps of fast-growing weeds that were threatening to move on our yard.
The lawn-care person told us that the work his company would do would not actually impact anything we could see. The renegade weed clumps were actually grass that was trying to integrate itself into our perfect lawn, he said. They would have to be dealt with later.
However, he explained, if we didn’t have this work done, our lawn, our carpet and our small dog would soon be infested with unstoppable weeds. We had to take it on faith that the nasty chemical stuff they sprayed all over our lawn would help us find acceptance in our neighborhood.
When it came time for the first mowing, I was actually looking forward to it. To prove my passion and intensity for my new stewardship, I decided to put fresh oil in the lawn mower.
My wife, who reads instruction books, believes that oil should be changed every 30 feet and checked every 15 feet and yada, yada, yada. I think oil should be changed when the engine makes that pinging sound and starts coughing black smoke.
This time, however, I patiently filled my lawn mower with some fresh oil and then some. I added extra oil. I knew that was probably against the instruction manual but yada, yada, yada.
You may think that was where I made my critical mistake. It’s true that overfilling the oil caused enough blue smoke to go into the air that I feared Al Gore would appear from nowhere, push me to the ground and start kicking me. Actually, he would have been justified in doing so.
The real mistake happened, however, when I set my lawn mower carefully to the lowest setting. I thought it was on the highest setting, but it turns out my reasoning was faulty. You may think a normal person would have immediately noticed that his lawn mower was spinning at near dirt level, but I would argue that a normal person, surrounded in blue smoke, might have made the same mistake I made.
I scraped the front lawn clean and made four damaging strips around the side and back of my yard before I realized what was wrong and raised the level of the lawn mower. On a normal day, hundreds of cars go by my exposed, unfenced corner lot without noticing anything but a strange, poisonous smell. After I mowed my lawn, I noticed that motorists seemed to find my misguided handiwork entertaining.
I hoped they would think that I had hired some very dimwitted but needy teenager to strip-mine my yard. No such luck. For days now, my “friends” have been calling or stopping by to ask about my lawn. They put on innocent faces at first as they ask about my strategic approach to lawn shaving, but they always end up laughing long and hard while I endure their abuse patiently.
My wife locked me in my bedroom with the lawn-mower manual for two days. When she let me out, I noticed that parts of my lawn were already growing back. The poisonous smell was gone, and the smoke had cleared enough for us to see all the way to the cars driving slowly by our house.
I think it’s going to be a great summer after all. I’ll get the knack for this lawn-care stuff in no time. I haven’t even started experimenting with our cool sprinkler system yet. It’s run from this complicated timer box that, if programmed correctly, will water our lawn in zones at specific times in the middle of the night – while we are sleeping.
Again, my wife is saying we need to wade through the instruction book.
I don’t need no stinkin’ instruction book. I mean, really, it’s just a sprinkler system. What could possibly go wrong?
(Steve Eaton works in the USU College of Business and writes columns that appear in several regional newspapers. Contact him at stevetrib@yahoo.com.)