Weeds

I don’t know what to do.

At some point my lawn became completely overrun by weeds and the only thing I’ve figured out is that I have to do something. What exactly? I don’t know.

I suppose it should be no surprise that I don’t know what to do since it is only by not doing whatever it is I must now do that my lawn has become such a mess. Only by neglecting this problem so consistently could things have become this bad. Extreme ignorance was required over a substantial period of time to get me to this shameful moment.

Last week, I came home to find a flyer stuck in my mailbox from a local lawn care company. On it, they had written “I noticed a lot of weeds and crab grass on your lawn, call us.” I presume this person had gone to some sort of weed school to spot my problems so quickly. I would like to send the flyer back to this company with a note of my own: “I noticed your company is obnoxious,” but likely will just accept their ridicule and move on.

A few years ago, I called someone I knew that had a lawn care company to help me with this problem. He was very happy to spray pesticides on my lawn and for a year I had fewer weeds. It was about this time that the world was talking about the dangers of pesticides, but my friend, the lawn care guy, just scoffed at the naysayers. He had likely been to weed school, but it did seem to me that chemicals that kill plants might be dangerous to the rest of us and should be avoided.

The more I saw my friend frolicking in these same chemicals day in, day out, the more I suspected that in-depth studies were not required to determine the dangers of these chemicals to humans.

My wife decided that we couldn’t continue to spray our lawn in future years because our kids played on that grass and it might also be dangerous to animals. As we don’t have any pets, I suspect she’s worried about squirrels and caterpillars far more than I ever realized. The lawn care guy didn’t call me the following year to ask about renewing my contract. As I didn’t hear any news to suggest it, I don’t believe it was because he had died. Regardless, I was now on my own to take care of my lawn.

I decided that hand pulling my weeds was the answer. I used a garden spade that I found in the garage and got to work. The spade was not overly sharp and far too big for the job, so often I found myself digging a sizeable hole around the area the weed (and quite a bit of grass) had once been. I read somewhere that pulling out only the top of the plant would allow the weed to quickly grow back, so I did my best to pull out the roots. This is especially hard to do with a large, dull garden spade, so it was common place for me to dig tunnels into the sides of my enormous holes to try to get at the roots, which openly mocked me. When I had gone over my lawn once, I was horrified to see that I had somehow missed several million weeds and that my lawn looked like a boot camp for gophers.

My next door neighbour is a helpful guy and without saying “my God man, what are you doing to your lawn?” he gave me a tool he had used successfully to pull his weeds. Over the course of that summer I used the new tool, which made smaller holes, but the weeds continued to pop up.

The next year, I read that the best way to deal with weeds is to choke them out by having a healthy lawn of grass. I bought top soil, fertilizer and grass seed. It turns out that I had actually bought 100 years worth of grass seed, but I figured I could store it in my garage for the rest of the century. One weekend, I rebuilt my lawn with these elements and was out twice a day to water it with my 10 year old sprinkler, which had to be moved 14 times to hit all areas of my odd shaped property. My better half nagged me on a daily basis about the cost of the water I was using, but she had never been to weed school, so her “advice” was worthless. I read somewhere that I needed to water my lawn with one inch of water, twice per day and the best way to measure this was with an empty tuna can. In theory this is a wonderful idea, but as my sprinkler does not drop water like rain, it soon became clear that I wouldn’t gather an inch of water in the can in anything less than a month of watering.

I also bought a different weeding tool that prevented me from being on my hands and knees. This would come in handy when pulling the odd weed which might penetrate my newly formed force field of grass. If my lawn was fuller because of my efforts, it was very difficult to tell. The packages had suggested my lawn would resemble a golf course, but I didn’t see myself charging green fees anytime soon with this lawn. The new tool was better than the hand tools, but that was a small blessing because once again, I was looking at millions and millions of weeds!!!!

It has become very clear to me that many of my neighbours are ignoring the local pesticide ban. Their lawns are weed free and they are not hand pulling weeds every waking second of their lives-a schedule that I have discovered must be maintained for weedlessness. The only lawns which are overrun by weeds are mine, those owned by the city, and properties I presume have been condemned.

I think the ultimate insult in all of this is that I discovered that mice had gotten into my giant bag of grass seed and eaten most of it. I hope my wife is happy that she protected these thieving rodents and all creatures great and small that live in my weed infested lawn. At least someone is getting some enjoyment out of it.