By Dave Yoo
Probably the main selling point with the house we bought last year was the backyard. It was perfectly flat and the grass was plush because the previous owner, a biology professor, was also a croquet fiend and, according to my neighbor Mike, could often be seen crouched on his hands and knees with a bucket beside him, picking out weeds and stones from the grass, which he mowed once a week. Along the sides of the back lawn he’d grown dozens of different types of flowers, and he’d even planted a line of baby hemlocks across the back of the yard that, by the time we’d moved in, served as a perfect back fence, approximately eight feet tall, that completely blocked our view of the neighbors. It’s a modest house, to say the least, certainly not one that would typically have a sprinkler system, but he’d installed one to ensure a perfectly green square patch of lawn so he could play croquet with his friends every chance he got. In a neighborhood full of tiny lawns, ours apparently was the best.
That is, until we moved in last year.
My wife and I didn’t realize that taking care of the yard meant more than just mowing it once every two weeks, and as a result last summer our lawn turned yellow and patchy. We were determined to take better care of the yard this year, and so one afternoon this past June I borrowed Mike’s spreader and fertilized the entire yard. The spinner thing that sprinkles out the fertilizer wasn’t working properly, though, and I basically poured out a winding, thick line of fertilizer all over the yard, so it looked like an Etch A Sketch when I was done. I then took a rake and tried to spread it out as best as I could, and figured that was that.
The doorbell rang the next morning at 7 a.m. I stumbled out of bed and answered the door. It was Mike.
“Turn on your sprinkler RIGHT NOW,” he said. I did as I was told, and when I went outside and actually looked closer at the yard I gasped. The concentrated chemicals were burning the grass not even yellow, but a color closer to white. “You should have told me the spinner wasn’t working right—if you’re lucky, you’ll saturate the soil and maybe salvage your yard,” he added.
Salvage my yard?
A few days later it was official—I’d burned my entire yard. Not only that, but I was informed that the soil was now completely dead, and grass wouldn’t grow at least for another year. I’ve since been patching the yard, bit by bit, ripping out the yellow-white grass, along with a couple inches of soil beneath it, and replacing it with fresh soil and seeds. I water religiously, and the grass has grown back in, albeit sparser, and the yard is now decidedly lumpy compared to the pizza stone flat shape it was before we’d moved in.
That weekend was the annual block party. Everyone was complaining about how their yards were decimated by woodchucks this summer, a seeming horde of the lawn-digging rodents taking over the entire neighborhood. It turned out I was the only one whose lawn hadn’t been completely overrun by woodchucks.
“What’s your secret?” a neighbor asked me.
I patted him on the shoulder and shot him a sympathetic smile.
“Fertilizer,” I said. “Lots and lots of fertilizer.”
