Lawn Care and Maintenance

Since several of you asked and I have nothing better to do (I'm putting in a solid 3 hour work week this summer), I thought I'd discuss our lawn. Specifically its current emerald green color. I went back through all of our pictures so we could do a frame by frame comparison. Hopefully no one is in tears from boredom by the time you're done with this post. You might, because you will literally be watching the grass grow.

March 7, 2007. The day our backyard was landscaped. Here's the sod being delivered. This is the first step to a great lawn. Use sod. Grass grown from seed is patchy and not good. And, yes, "not good" is a specific botany term.The concrete border. Look at how tiny our plants are. Most of those are the same plants that we still have.

The last time our lawn looked this good. Ginger moved in 2 days later and promptly pooped on it.

So, we'll jump ahead a little. This was Feb. 21, 2009. We don't water the grass in the winter, so it was brown and icky. The weeds were nice and green though.

Feb. 22. You can see the weeds even better. There were several hundred of them by the time we got around to pulling them. March 8. I had pulled all of the weeds right before this. There were seriously more than 200 of them. I lost count after a while. I was in a body cast for about a week after.

March 14. Michael used a rake to puncture little holes all over the lawn and then used said rake to pull up extra grass. Look at that huge pile. Dethatching and aerating grass allows water and oxygen to get to the roots. Right after this we fertilized.

May 3. Getting green. May 10. We have automatic sprinklers which really help with maintenance. The grass gets all the water it needs and we don't have to think about it.
June 1. It's as green as it's going to get.
June 29.We're having 2 main problems with the lawn at this point. #1) It's so thick that Michael has a hard time mowing it. We just got an electric lawnmower so hopefully that will help. #2) The grass keeps growing over the border. It grows so fast and thick we can't keep up with it. Any ideas?Was it boring enough? Should I do a post about paint peeling off a wall next week? How about I take daily pictures of the bananas that I buy at the grocery store every week as they slowly ripen and then start to rot on the banana holder.

On a totally unrelated note, I created a patriotic playlist for the 4th of July weekend. And since it took a bit of time, I'm considering the weekend to be at least 6 days. Make sure you listen to The Stars and Stripes Forever Medley. That's how I woke up as a kid. My dad would put it on his record player, turn it on full blast, open our doors and then come jump on our beds. Fun times.