By Geoffrey Norman
In the mid-part of April around here, you begin thinking about yard work and start laying in the necessities. Once the last scraps of snow have melted away, things happen fast and you can quickly fall way behind the curve. And the part of the whole equation that requires the greater part of your time and attention is, of course, the least interesting. That would be the grass.
Everything about a yard is more beguiling than the grass, which doesn’t do anything but grow. And there are no guarantees on that.
You have to coax it and baby it and feed it special formulas.
But first you have to rake it.
Because the grass has been buried under snow and scoured by sheets of ice, it is brown and matted and to bring it back to life, you must scratch it briskly with a metal lawn rake. This removes the old dead grass and, evidently, invigorates the surviving roots and blades. It is also tedious work that consumes time you could otherwise spend on the perennial beds or the vegetable garden or the golf course where there is an actual point to grass.
All grass, however, must be attended to. It is needy, that way.
The first thing it needs is to be dressed. This involves a product that is both fertilizer and weed killer and when I buy it, I ask for “weed and feed.” I’m not sure if that is the proper, commercial name or just a generic description and I don’t really care. I resent paying for the stuff. I feel like I’m pampering the grass and I wonder why. What does the grass do for me in return for feeding it special food and for poisoning the dreaded dandelions? And why, by the way, is grass considered superior to dandelions which can, at least, be made into wine or salad greens.
What the grass does, once it has been lavishly dressed is … grow. This means that it must be cut. It has never been explained to me why grass must not be allowed to exceed one inch in height. This is just one of those truths. You fertilize the grass to make it grow. Once it grows, you cut it back.
Deal with it.
This cycle of growing and cutting starts slowly enough but by late June, when the days are long and the sun shines for 16 hours out of 24, the cycle of grow and cut, grow and cut, begins to spin more rapidly until it seems like you just finished cutting the grass when it needs to be cut again.
The cutting of grass is increasingly a capital-intensive business. When I was a kid and made money by cutting grass, I used one of those old push mowers with the blades that turned faster the harder you pushed. You could sharpen the blades with a flat file and the only petroleum product required was a little grease for the bearings.
Then, the world moved up to power mowers. Either the electric kind where you trail a long cord and occasionally run over it, tripping all the circuit breakers in the house, or the kind that is powered by a two-stroke engine. These, of course, rely on fuel. A mixture of gasoline and special oil. There is a proper ratio for this mix and I never can remember what it is or whether or not I have added oil to the gas in the can on which I have written “pre-mix” with a magic marker. Power mowers don’t burn that much gas but for some reason, you never seem to have any.
A few years ago, mowing the lawn while standing up came to be seen as an ordeal and the riding mower became an essential piece of equipment for anyone with more than a quarter acre of yard covered in grass. You could climb aboard one of these babies, fire it up, and get to work on the grass while pretending to be a farmer, disking a field before planting season. These tractors have all the essentials, to include a canopy to shade the driver while he performs his labors and a cup holder so that he will not, heaven forefend, get thirsty as he works.
Lawn tractors have, I think, done a lot for the growing of grass and, no doubt, the sale of grass seed, weed and feed, etc.. What used to be a fairly boring and pointless business now has meaning. You put up with all the aggravation of growing grass precisely so you can cut the grass and own a tractor for doing the job.
I once thought there was a fortune to be made in self-pruning lawn grass but the riding mower changed all that and I suppose I’ll be raking, fertilizing and cutting the grass again this spring and in springs to come.
My Toro tractor, though, does ease the burden. ◊
Geoffrey Norman is a Dorset author whose latest book is a children’s book entitled The Stars Above Us.
