578 let's talk about grass

Let's take a minute to talk about grass.

In Deb's gardening business, in drought stricken California, in the city of San Francisco, we generally advised against planting grass. In fact, we've had a number of jobs where we tore out lawns and replaced them with low-water, drought-tolerant plantings. These gardens are beautiful, and relatively low maintenance. 

Here in the little town I like to call Chillwellness, there is a lot of grass. Our 1/3 of an acre is almost entirely grass. Well, a bunch of dandelions and other weeds, lucerne otherwise known as alfalfa, and who knows what else. The houses surrounding us also are mostly grass lawns. 

It's a hell of a lot of territory. Any plantings on that much ground are going to take a fair amount of maintenance, especially when they're just getting going. 

This has unfortunately forced me to rethink the lawn. For the past 3 weeks, I've found myself spending an hour or two mowing the grass. When dandelions popped up seemingly overnight last week, I went out and mowed them right down, feeling guilty about the bees as they fled from in front of my electric powered blade. 

"There's something very real about this keeping up with the neighbors thing," I told my mom on the phone a couple weeks ago, looking out at our neighbor's well kept very short perfectly green no dandelions anywhere grass. He waters and mows at all summer long. For the two summers we've been in charge, ours has gone brown after the rain stopped. It didn't grow much, just a few weeds sprouted up.

And then there's snow. Snow will fall on pretty much anything, bushes or bare dirt. It looks nice on grass, but it looks nice in general. But cleaning up leaves and stuff is another story, it's much easier when you're just raking the lawn versus working in an ornamental bed. 

So what am I thinking about grass now? 

As I push around the mower, there's a certain amount of exercise and vigor that I enjoy. For a lot of men in America, mowing the grass might be the most "manly" thing you do every week. It sure beats the shit out of picking up the pizza on Friday night or answering emails. 

We live in a time when most of us are incredibly disconnected from nature. We can name more fast food joints and video games and movie episodes and TV shows and than we could name flowers or birds or trees. As sad and unnatural as a lawn is, it's as close to outdoor time, nature, as many of us get.

Plus, there's a crazy odd satisfaction to looking at your fresh cut grass. There's an art to it, you can look at that lawn and see the fresh tracks and say, "I did that."

As a professional gardener, I can attest to the fact that a well-pruned, weeded, and freshly blown garden can give you the same satisfaction. But to the untrained eye, it's a lot harder to see, and certainly a lot harder to achieve. Grass provides instant gratification.