The Big Green Lawn

I am not by nature one of those individuals who aspire to a pristine monoculture carpet of green grass in front of (or behind) my house. I love dandelions; they are fun, pretty, and marvelously nutritious -- even medicinal. I think Hare and the Big Green Lawn is a wonderful book. I like to keep a chunk of backyard habitat and a vegetable garden, because I have this crazy notion that land is meant to produce food for people and animals. The only real use I have for expanses of cultivated grass is as a place for children to run around.

However, the house we live in was vacant for two years before we moved in. It hasn't exactly reverted to prairie like Hare's lawn; it's weedy in parts, and bare in parts, and so thatched it's almost dead in other parts. It is neither wild nor cultivated...it's just... scruffy.

We could have a lawn service come in and do the job...but I have this thing against putting chemicals on the place where my children play and my salad grows. No, it must be an organic lawn (more here and here). Crunch crunch. And so the restoration of the Big Green Lawn has become my personal quest, nay, battle...

My dear dedicated husband so loves his hippie wife that he rented the seed thingy from the hardware store and reseeded the whole mess. He has also assured me that he will rent the de-thatcher and the aerator in the fall and do that job as well.

Meanwhile, I am obsessed, anxiously nursing my tiny seedlings of blue fescue and waging a one-woman war on the weeds, following the tractor sprinkler day after day and filing ten-gallon bucket after ten-gallon bucket with anything that isn't grass -- but leaving the dandelions, of course.