the grass is always greener
Posted by Rebecca, November 7th, 2010
One of the added bonuses of buying our particular house was that the builder included sod and landscaping in our front yard. Our sod was laid in April and we went on to have the hottest, driest summer ever. We don’t have a sprinkler system and we didn’t want to use too much water, so by the end of the summer our grass was looking awful. It came back to life quite a bit with some rainfall in September and October, but it is still showing signs of the heat.
Good in some spots…
Awful in others…
Many people in our neighborhood use Scotts lawn services. They’ve come by before offering to maintain our lawn, but we declined. We reseeded the bare spots at least twice on our own, with no luck. We knew the grass had to be aerated, but what the heck did we know about that? This is our first time actually having a yard! I knew you could rent an aerator, but with the cold weather quickly approaching, we knew it was another thing we likely wouldn’t have time for on the weekends.
So when Scotts came knocking a few weeks ago, we listened. The very nice man told me how the builder is in such a rush to get the sod down, that they are not laying it on hearty soil. We learned this on our own while planting flowers this summer, when we saw our soil was actually construction zone orange dirt. Two of our azaleas never rooted and I literally pulled them out of the ground with little effort and they were still shaped like the pots the landscaper took them out of! What he said made sense, so we signed up for just some aerating and seeding. Aerated grass looks like goose poop.
No fertilizers, no pesticides, I don’t like that stuff. We have a little pond across the street, okay it’s a detention basin with fountains in it, but there is a family of geese in there. I don’t want those chemicals floating around the cute little babies, nevermind all of the people who walk their dogs, the deer in the backyard and the roaming peacocks. Wait, I don’t think I had this blog for the peacock story. Another story for another day….
So far we’ve seen a few grass sprouts here and there and hopefully we still have some grass growing time left this fall!
Good for you for staying away from the pesticides and fertilizers! A friend of mine bought a new build and they were one of the first ones in – so when the summer was so hot (they live on the east coast, too), the builder actually came back and re-sodded! Guess they wanted the neighborhood looking good for all the potential buyers. 🙂
Pretty much everyone here has underground sprinkler systems (us included), but heck, we live in a desert. If keeping the grass wasn’t part of our CCR’s, we’d tear it out in a second.
Yeah they actually replace it if something goes wrong… Like they laid some sod in March when the ground was still too cold, so those people got a second round. But our “issue” was that we didn’t water it morning and night. We tried to water it once a day, just to save the free sod we were given!
We are actually looking into sprinklers for the spring. We have an association too, so we don’t want to be the slackers in the ‘hood! Plus trying to water our entire yard with our arching type sprinklers is time consuming!
I played soccer last night on newly aerated fields, which added an interesting level of difficulty to my already feeble and uncoordinated game! I’m pumped to hear you opted against all of those nasty chemicals – good job!