After my last post, my dear older and much wiser sister Chris posted a comment that advised us to get a great deal of topsoil spread over our yard before we seeded. This is excellent advice, born from hard experience, which should produce very good results for anyone who follows it. Unfortunately, I did not see the comment until after we’d seeded the lawn last Friday.
This is just one of the many things we’ve done wrong when it came to repairing the yard, and yes, I did finally convince The Mister to go for it ourselves and not call in the pros. We should have levelled the yard; we should have aerated the ground; we should have brought in a truckload of earth to seed in, then fertilized it, then covered it with mulch; we should have used a fancy-schmancy spreader thingy and not a cheap handheld jobby. Oh yes, gentle readers, we should have done many, many things, but when your backup plan for lawn repair is to pave it over and paint it green, you tend to make it up as you go along.
Once the trench had been reduced to ground level and raked, I asked The Mister to go purchase some ten bags or so of topsoil. He disappeared and then returned with ten bags of what he told me was topsoil which he kindly laid out for me by the trench since I would be taking the early shift the next day. When I got out there just after sunup, armed with all manner of garden implements, I noticed the bags were not topsoil, but organic compost. Uh-huh. What to do?
I could wait until the store opened and get the stuff I wanted, but that would take at least an hour and a half and it was already getting uncomfortably warm. So…what the hey! I sliced open the bags, dumped them on the trench and went to town raking it in. The compost actually looked beautiful – rich black soil that made you believe anything could grow in it. And it was on sale for half-price! Yowza! That was good enough for me. So later that day, I sent His Nibs down to get more of the same, and the next day more of the same, and the next day still more of the same.
By Friday, the yard was not looking too bad. In fact, our neighbours kept stopping by and complimenting us on it. Mind you, the yard had been looking so dreadful for so long, they may have been relieved to see any improvement going on. But we were encouraged none-the-less, and I told The Mister it was time to finish up.
“After supper tonight, we’re putting on the seed.”
“All right, Missus, then I’ll give ‘er a good watering.”
Apparently, our lawn is female.
Anyway, that evening, The Mister walked up and down the trench and the divots (deep ruts left by the burly plumber folks’ machinery) and seeded everything with the little handheld spreader. Then he turned on the sprinkler – oh yeah, that was a new purchase for us. We have NEVER watered the grass, not in 24 years of marriage. In fact, we have never given the grass a thought beyond having it mowed now and then, so all this fuss was a pretty big deal for us. And the neighbours too, I suspect.
The Mister very kindly said he would look after the watering, twice a day, but a few times God saved him the trouble, like last night and this morning, which was nice.
For some reason, I cannot pass the front door without checking out “the front forty” as we call it, and day before yesterday, just four days after the planting, lo and behold, I thought I saw little green shoots poking out of the trench here and there. I ran and got my glasses, looked again and then threw my hands in the air and let go with a great, “Thank you, Jesus!” (It’s not blasphemy if it’s sincere. Which it was.) The Mister came running and couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Does this mean it worked?” he asked.
We planted “fall-plant seed”, actually “late fall-plant seed,” but no one expected the kind of temperatures we’ve had in the last few days. Two days with the mercury over 95 degrees, the seed must have been thinking, “Where’d they plant us, Tahiti?” This is my theory for the early germination, and now the trench is completely covered in new sprouts and the divots are coming along.
As far as I’m concerned, it worked. In spite of everything, it worked great.
