A large patch of my front yard died over the winter. I am not sure why. The damaged area is directly below a maple tree, so maybe the grass doesn’t receive enough direct sunlight. Maybe the lack of snow this past January failed to insulate parts of my yard from subzero temperatures. Maybe my limited use of chemical fertilizer failed to give the turf the nutrients it needed to fight off some kind of disease. All I know is that a chunk of my front yard did not come back this spring.
The best repair strategy would have been to tear out the entire dead area and start over from scratch. However, when I showed up with a hoe, I noticed a few blades of young fescue trying to poke up here and there. While it makes no logical sense, I did not have the heart to destroy my yard’s valiant effort to survive. I put the hoe back in the garage and replaced it with a hand trowel. My new plan was to hand dig around the small living portions of turf and only reseed the areas that were 100% dead. This quadrupled the amount of work I had to do, so instead of repairing the entire damaged area in one fell swoop, I attacked the problem square foot by square foot. Breaking down the task, I had to:
- Choose a 15-square foot plot for reseeding
- Dig out the dead sod from that area with a hand trowel
- Mix grass seed with top soil in a wheelbarrow
- Tamp grass seed and top soil into the bare spots I’d created
- Cover the newly seeded area with burlap
- Water daily
In two afternoons of work I was able to repair a 10’ x 3’ area, which was about a fifth of the total damage.
The morning after reseeding I was sitting at my writing table in the living room. I looked at the window, only to see two mourning doves poking their beaks through the burlap and eating my grass seed. The whole reason for the burlap was to keep the birds off. I went outside, chased the birds away, and covered the burlap with a sheet of clear plastic. The plastic lasted only half a day as I came to realize that I couldn’t water the area if it had a waterproof covering. I decided to share my grass seed with the birds.
The next morning I again checked out my handiwork and discovered that the burlap had been completely pulled away from the reseeded area. I’d used lawn staples to pin the burlap in place, so mourning doves wouldn’t have had the strength to make this happen. I assumed squirrels were the culprits, and this was confirmed when I went outside to discover several holes dug into the fresh topsoil. The squirrels weren’t even after the grass seed. They just wanted soft ground for burying their finds. When I complained to Manyu, she said, “Good, then maybe they won’t dig up my potted flowers.”
On a related matter, Clare is thinking about buying her first house. She and her boyfriend go to open houses most Sundays. While I try hard not to tell my responsible twenty-six year old daughter what to do with her life, I couldn’t help but say, “I don’t think that you should buy. You have it good right now. Do you really want to use your evenings and weekends on home repairs and yard work?”
I know that I don’t.
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