My stupid lawn

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

It won’t die!
So, I moved into my new house last November, after having done some major work to it. Plumbing, gas plumbing, floor joists, new flooring, etc… I mention those repairs/redos because I put off a million small things to gitterdun so I can move in. So, I still am doing little things around the house in a piecemeal way, mostly on weekends.

Well, this means that i don’t really want to spend a lot of time on my HUGE yard until I get all the house things done. So, I freakin scalped the lawn, hoping that the lack of rain and the scalping might stunt or retard the growth. Guess who’s the retard now? Yeah, apparantly I pretty much dethatched the yard with that initial scalping and the lawn gorew like a mother fu… well, like a lawn.

So, I get to spend a good portion of a weekend day doing lawn mowing. And all the other things one must do in addition.

Don’t get me wrong, I love making a killer lawn. I’ve always been very good at it. But I’m just trying to not have to mow this huge yard so often, instead wanting to finish the house and get my awesome lawn next year.

But everytime I mow the sucker down short, thinking that the Summer drouhgt of Oklahoma will finally kick in and free me from weekly lawn maintainance, along comes a rain shower that Monday. By Wednesday, I have a thick, green lawn, plotting to keep on growing in an annoyingly good way which will be needing to get trimmed again to keep the spikies down by Sunday and …

Oh well. I apparantly have an automatic green thumb. My lawn may as well be back down in Houston, as lush as it keeps getting.

Stupid live plants. Die! Or slow down enough to allow me a weekend off every other one.
You should see my trees…

2

Oh man, i totally feel you!

I, too, bought a home in November. I don’t really have a massively huge yard (1/2 acre) but it’s bigger than my parent’s yard which I was used to mowing.

My folks decided to ditch their lawn mowing this year and hire someone. So I got their mower. I like the mower - self-propelled mulcher. But my grass…the grass and the mower don’t get along!

I managed to cut it way short early on in the season. Then, two solid weeks of rain. Since it’s a mulcher, I have to cut it relatively high to keep the damn thing from conking out as I mow (or scrap the mulching and attach the chute to blow the grass out the side. I don’t want that!)

I cut it on setting 4, which means it’s still high when I’m done. Then it rains, so 4 again - within a week. I try going to 3 - conks out. Back up to 4. Still conks out every so often.

Every time I go out there I am gambling with my mower deck height. I foolishly think I can get away with 2. “I just mowed 4 days ago, surely I can lower the deck this time!” yeeeeaaah right!

I never realized that being a homeowner meant you were a slave to your lawn. A day or two after I mow I start checking weather forecasts and planning when the next mow will be. IT. NEVER. ENDS!!!

Yeah and someday, NoClueBoy, we’ll start a thread about our trees. Oy!

3

NoClueBoy

Can you pay a neighborhood boy/girl 10 bucks or so to mow your lawn for you? The cost might be worth it if it frees up some of your weekend time.

4

No kids doing that around here. Things have changed since we were young.

I did hire a crew a couple of times because I was just so backed up, timewise. Flagged down a crew I saw on the next block and they came and did it. Not for ten bucks, tho!
Zipper, yeah, I love my HUGE oaks and willows and that one ultra cool looking mulberry on my side yard. But I am NOT looking forward to the fall. You know what I mean.

Still. I love having a yard of my own again. It’s worth the hassle. :cool:

5

I could kill your lawn. I mean, if you really wanted it dead. I’m good like that.

6

Hey!! So it was you that stole our May showers! We want’em back, damn you!!

There’s been no rain in Dallas since something like May 8. Drought conditions, burn bans, watering bans, f@*~ing hot …

7

TIme for some sheep or goats. :smiley:

8

So , were you thinkin’ agent orange , napalm , or maybe thermonuclear ?

9

If you want a low-maintenance lawn, try planting some native grasses. Most urban lawns these days are Kentucky bluegrass, which is a pain in the butt to maintain if you don’t live in Kentucky. I live in arid eastern Colorado, and we recently built a new house out in the sandhills. My lawn in buffalo grass, and the rest of our acreage is slowly being seeded with native grasses. It takes a lot of patience, and the buffalo grass will take five years to completely cover, but I’ve seen similar lawns in the area, and they’re worth the wait. Of course, buffalo grass will never be really green – it’s a bluish green when it’s at its best, and it goes dormant in a drought, and it doesn’t green up in the spring until it gets really warm. Contact a local extension agent for expert advice.

10

So this is your secret?
I could put you in touch with our local greenskepper. He’s completely killed all nine greens several times in his tenure. And he can’t grow mold. He could probably give you some tips.

11

Have you considered a bigger mower? I have a fairly large lawn and the best purchase I ever made was a used 48" mower from a nearby landscaper. Cut my mowing time down from two or three evenings to about an hour. (Much of the improvement is due to the 17HP engine on this thing – it laughs at the wet grass that would choke my old mulching mower.)