Green Grow The Lawn, O

As summer widens and the smells associated with it return – the family BBQs, the blooming flowers, the car exhaust from the freeway – I am reminded of the oddity that is me actually cutting my own lawn this season. Please understand, I have not mowed a lawn for 30+ years. Once I was in college that type of yard work just never came up, even during the 6-month holiday of living with my parents. Then, upon moving into my own house, May and I just accepted the standing offer to continue to use the same landscapers as the previous tenants, and hey, why not? I wouldn’t have to mess around with either buying a new lawn mower or getting the old one to work or having gas stored in the shed out back which some random arsonist might just stumble upon, so I was all onboard.

But now that I have started again, fond memories of me cutting the lawn in my North Olmsted backyard have returned: oak and maple trees providing ample shade and a cool breeze while I listened to my radio headphones and daydreamed about one day driving a Trans Am like in Knight Rider, completely obvious to the clumps of grass spilling out from the overstuffed clippings bag and my father striding behind me, yelling no doubt words of encouragement that I was utterly deaf to.

Anyway, as I previously detailed, part of my and my wife’s money-saving strategy this year has been to drop the landscaping service and care for the lawn on our own.

Once I had properly ended the lawnmowing services (for the right company, that is …heh), the first real step was getting a lawn mower. Now, I have never been a fan of having to get and store gas for the mower, plus with the price of gas going up, I really wanted to explore getting an electric mower. They have been getting more and more powerful, durable and cheaper, so I checked online for different brands and finally selected one based on its battery life, durability, and bright green lime color (but not necessarily in that order).

It was delivered a few days later and I immediately moved it to the garage.

Where it then sat for many days.

This was all back around March/April, so I was in no rush as I had plenty of time. May did not share my optimism and asked me every week or so when I was going to finally unpack and test it, and I always said “soon.” What she didn't realize is that when I said “soon,” I meant it not in the context of a week or month but rather the astronomical time scale of the milky way eventually crashing into the Andromeda galaxy.

May was not, however, thrilled at my frame of reference, and shifted from “asking” to “heavily encouraging” me to get it set up. And to her credit, she was right – the lawn was starting to get a bit long in the tooth (or stem, if you will) and even I had to admit I couldn’t keep waiting until the spiral arms of M31 started brushing up against us.

Slight problem, though – this was now the time of spring that the carpenter bees became really active around the garage. Whenever I went outside to unpack the mower, our friendly neighborhood carpenter bees were frantically buzzing around. So each time, I would step outside, be immediately greeted by about 2 dozen highly agitated bees, leading me to politely state “Nope!” and go back inside.

Finally, after another couple weeks the carpenter bees had moved on so I was finally able to get the mower ready. The good news is that in the earlier down time I was doing research on mowing the lawn (yes, I was researching this, because, by golly, I wasn’t kidding when I said I haven’t done this in 30 thirty years, have forgotten a lot about it, and even back then, as my father will attest, I was not exactly a model of flawless efficiency).

The big revelation from this study time? Turns out you can either use the clippings bag OR just mulch the grass and leave it on the lawn! As in, not pick anything up! WHAT?!?!

Bagging is what I always envisioned as the only real option, and this was just because it's what we always seemed to do back in North Olmsted. Sad to say, before this year, I never really researched law care culture well enough and had been making embarrassing generalizations about the practice. For this, I am deeply ashamed.

When I read about the option of mulching the grass, I felt like I had gained access to the Freemasons, or the Illuminati, or the Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring. You mean I can just cut the grass and not have to worry about bagging? And it’s actually better for the lawn because the nutrients return the soil? So, I can get better results for less work?

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The one trick, apparently, is cutting it early enough; let the grass get too long and the clumping starts up again, leading to dead spots on the lawn and disappointed fathers.

With the research done, the lawn mower assembled, and the battery charged, I – if you’ll pardon the term – charged into work.

Okay, sure, mowing a lawn is not quite as taxing as removing the anomalies from string theory, but still, I was pleasantly surprised how well it went. Not just thanks to my tireless and intense 15 minutes of watching YouTube videos as deep research, but I found that as I was mowing, things were filtering back from the “good ol’ days:”

• Keep your eyes at the other side of the lawn as you cut; you make straighter lines that way than just staring down the whole time.

• Cut so only half of the mower is on the uncut grass; this way, you don’t overload the blades with too much grass.

• Do a walk across the lawn ahead of time to pick up debris, like branches, trash, dog poo, and your abandoned hopes and dreams.

The lack of needing to bag the clippings really makes a big difference, as now it’s just some nice outside exercise in the shade of our yard’s trees. Takes about 30 minutes or so, makes me feel good when it is finished, and is a good reason to get outside and, quite literally, touch grass.

I still have room for improvement, though. I need an edge trimmer of some type to handle the spots around the trees and bricks along the driveway, and I need some sort of fence or something around May’s plant areas: in the background, a good chunk of them have a lot of grass in the beds and the plants are small enough that it is never clear to me if they are a weed or not. I have, sadly, already “cut short” the plant life for a few of them.

Not wanting to repeat the same mistakes, I approached May one night earnestly. “Oh beloved wife?”

“Yes, dearest husband?” She totally 100% replied.

“I am afraid that we need to talk about boundaries."

The discussion that followed was not what I expected, at all, but was exceptionally enlightening nevertheless.