Relative Something

With all my attention of the last few weeks focused on the walls and furniture in our house, the yard has been mostly ignored. Last night, I squeezed in a couple of hours outside, and what I found was rather ugly, especially in light of our plan to be showing the place to buyers. There are a lot of things growing in our yard, and most of them aren’t grass.

Now, if you know me, you are probably thinking this is a good thing. I have spent most of the 25 years we have lived in the present location, reducing the areas of our lot that were lawn grass. But there are still spots that are supposed to be grass, and they seem to be giving in to the momentum I created to transition away from lawn and over to perennial ground cover.

In the areas that I let go natural, I lay down a lot of leaves as ground cover, which helps control weed growth. The grass areas don’t have that bed of leaves, and have become fertile ground for a wide variety of weeds that have infested.

As the month of April wound down, we enjoyed the blessing of plenty of rain showers here, and those April showers have brought May weeds (not flowers) on my lot. When Cyndie was last in town, we picked up some grass food with weed control to spread on the lawn, but it requires a forecast of at least 24 hours without rain. I haven’t been able to apply it yet.

While I was out mowing the lawn, and weeds, with my human powered reel mower, I contemplated the impression our yard will give to couples checking this place out. It occurred to me that the people who will find our house appealing will very likely be similar-minded enough that they will see the existing landscape as an attractive asset, not a negative.

I can hope.

Did some yard work yesterday. I went out planning to mow grass, but it was too wet.

A few months ago, our tree service newsletter warned that our mature trees were under such stress from repeated dry seasons that they would need extra attention and watering or they might not survive. This summer has been anything but dry. It makes my grass grow much too fast for my liking. With my little reel mower, I get better results if the grass doesn’t get too long between mowings. I need the blades of grass to stand up so the reel will be able to clip them as it passes over them. The long blades just lay down and my mower does nothing to pick them up for the scissor action of the mower.

Most people who know me are aware that over the years I’ve lived in my current house, I have mown less of the yard each summer and allow more of my little suburban lot transform to a natural wooded landscape. I figured it would reduce my need to do yard work. What I discovered is that my hours mowing have been replaced with hours doing the work of a lumberjack.

When I first hatched the idea of allowing my yard to go natural, it just looked like I was neglecting to care for it. That is not an impression that I want to give my neighbors. I was very anxious for things other than weeds to begin growing in the areas I stopped mowing. I was happy to find a great number of volunteer trees begin to appear when allowed. It was a shocking number, actually.

Not long after my property was becoming filled with finger-size to wrist-size trees, I learned about a pesky invasive tree, Common Buckthorn. It makes a great hedge, but left to its own, it crowds out everything around. I had Buckthorn growing everywhere. It became a major project to eradicate. My lumberjacking days had begun.

Over the years I have witnessed the onslaught of two other species that grow like weeds: Boxelder and Chokecherry. This is what I found in a query for information on the two trees:

Boxelder grows commonly along the banks of streams and rivers, and may occur as a weedy species in urban areas where its seeds are able to germinate. Boxelder has a soft wood that has no commercial value, but is important for wildlife and the stabilization of stream banks where it grows. Boxelder is not recommended for horticultural plantings.

Chokecherry
Urban/Recreational
Very limited use due to its suckering habit. Useful in screen or mass plantings

We have these two tree species sprouting everywhere. Seems to me, we need to manage these with the same focus that the invasive Buckthorn has attracted.

Yesterday, when I realized that the area where I was planning to remove trees would become a little too barren for my tastes, I devised a plan. Initially, I was considering just leaving stalks of the trunk, on which birds or squirrels could perch. It morphed to become a sculpture in homage to my fascination with rock balancing.

It was a far reach from the work I had planned to do when I walked out into the yard at the start of the day.

If ever there was a device appropriate for use in treating individuals suffering from extremes of perfectionism, I believe the reel mower admirably qualifies. It’s that time of year again: time to mow lawn grass. Even though there is NHL playoff hockey on television, the grass demands attention. The timing of the effort was precise. I waited just long enough that the strange hot spell that blew in with 40 mile-per-hour gusts of wind and temperatures in the mid 90° (F) range, has moved on and left us in the comfortable 70s, and got it done before the arrival of our early Memorial Day weekend.

As much as I value the aesthetic attraction of cleanly cut grass, my priorities fall more along the lines of scorn for the whole idea of lawn grass. In my mind, it is an environmental atrocity. Since we cut the blades of the plant, it never gets a full opportunity to live a normal life and we need to feed it and water it. It ends up requiring more energy than it is able to give back. That imbalance is exacerbated by the polluting machines that are used to mow.

As much as I would like to claim that my decision to switch to using an entirely human-powered reel mower to do our cutting was all about saving the planet, that would be a deviation from my normal brutal honesty. There was definitely some problem solving behind it, but it had more to do with a resistance toward having to buy and store fuel, and my shortcomings relating to small gas engines. The reel mower was my solution. I fell in love right away. Most of all, I enjoyed the immediate reward of the general quiet of mowing, as compared to using a power mower, and the total silence whenever I just stop pushing. What a pleasant experience the chore becomes in comparison.

But it comes with a sacrifice. It is nearly impossible to cut every last blade. I’ve tried a lot of variations of technique and no matter what I have done, the result continues to best be compared with the look of a bad haircut. However, in an ongoing lesson for my strong tendency toward perfectionism, I find that it pretty much always looks just fine from a distance. Given that I didn’t burn any fossil fuels and got some healthy exercise while doing it, I’d say it looks GREAT! What I’ve come to call, “perfect enough.”

And in a stroke of perfect timing, I was done in time to get in and witness the Penguins’ Evgeni Malkin perform his no-look backhand shot for a goal and for a hat-trick, too! The scene, with his parents in the crowd, teary eyed dad grabbing and kissing his mom’s cheek as the image was displayed on the big screen at the rink, causing the crowd to roar with even more energy, …it was special. More than perfect enough.