Lawn Labors

Anyone who's been following this blog for a few years know that each fall and spring, we slave over trying to make the lawn look healthy and green. I mentally divide the work into two major parts. The first is reclaiming the lawn from overgrown weeds, bushes, ivy, border plants gone wrong, etc. The second is making the areas that are already lawn grow green, healthy, weed-free grass. (yes, all of these categories lead to a different post, which should give you some idea of how much effort we've put in over time).

This year, as I mentioned last time, we decided we needed professional help. We did some work on our own in the spring, before the bugs came out. We cleared out some more liriope from the side section next to our driveway, both giving the bushes more room and carving out some more "lawn" area from the overgrown border edge:

But then this started happening every time we went outside (if you can't tell from my ugly feet, I have about 10 mosquito bites from working in the yard for about 10 minutes). So we largely ignored the outside all summer, whenever possible, doing only minimal yard work and weeding.

So this fall when we realized we needed to hire some people to take down our tree, we also got a quote on the grass and decided that the monetary cost was far better than the blood, sweat, and tears we were devoting to making it look nice. Because the grass seed we were laying never grew healthy and because we have moss, the landscaper declared that our soil was too acidic (apparently this is good for gardens, but not for lawns). So he advised the lawn of debris, advised aerating the soil to break it up a little, laying down lime to turn the soil more alkaline, and then over-seeding with hearty sun/shade combo grass seed. For under $500, they would fix our front, back, and side yards.

They spend a couple of days doing everything they said they would, laying down some straw to protect the seed and even come back twice to re-clear debris - the acorns this year were particularly voluminous and hard to clean up (they cleaned up once again for free and then we agreed to pay them to come back once more).

We're not really seeing any improvement, but hopefully all the conditions are right and in the spring we'll get some new healthy grass. In the meantime, we're doing our part. Already last year, we were trying to get in the habit of keeping the lawn free of leaves with a combination of raking, blowing, and mowing (none of which are very good at clearing the acorns, which is why we paid to let them handle those). We learned that leaves are acidic, and so in addition to killing grass by covering it up, it also ruins the soil by releasing acids while decomposing (remember - alkaline is good for grass).

Late this week, the trees finally decided it was fall and dropped a bunch of leaves (with many more still on the trees waiting to fall). So today D cut the lawn, picking up the leaves as he went. It's really quite amazing that a lawn mower can be such an effective leaf clearer.

And now we wait until spring and see if we got our money's worth!