Lawn rhymes with yawn. I love the look of a nice expanse of trimmed green, but I also love even more the look of a field full of wildflowers or tall grass, and I love most having anything else to do with my time than care for my little mini-pasture. Yet there are the not illegitimate expectations of my neighbors. I do have a responsibility to them. I owe them a neat, trimmed, relatively weed-controlled patch adjacent to theirs, for reasons aesthetic and related to real estate values. It’s part of the system we signed up for when we moved in.
Which means that today I will spread on the lawn a weed-and-feed chemical in order to kill weeds and fertilize the grass, sending as well who-knows-what into the ground water via the large drainage culvert the county saw fit to put on this lot when it was carved out of some farmer’s fields some decades ago. (On top of that is the weekly belching of unfiltered and unregulated exhaust from the riding mower we share with our neighbors Debbie and Stu.)
I really, really do not want to do all this, for these selfish and environmental reasons. I’m going to anyway, though; I want to see what happens to the lawn, if it makes a substantial difference to the weed/grass ratio, and to see how I feel afterwards. We’ll see if the importance of “curb appeal” when it comes time to move in the future (i.e., “greed”) overcomes my indolence and environmental awareness.