Sometime in November, the 40th year of writing this column will roll around. How I have changed. Nothing could better highlight how much than my response to the following (summarized) email: "New to Anchorage. Desperately trying to maintain the impeccable lawn and the landscaping of the previous owner."
Ah, I can remember buying a lawn that didn't have one single dandelion nor a solitary patch of clover -- impeccable, as it were.
My advice back then would have been to do exactly what I did to ensure I was not the one responsible for ruining the perfection that had been handed over: Get a hose-end sprayer, fill it with a broadleaf weed killer and never let one of those suckers, dandelion or clover, even think about rearing a flower bud.
Apply high-nitrogen fertilizer three times a year, spring, early summer and after the first frost so the lawn would green up immediately upon the return of spring. And water like your lawn's life depended on it.
Even today, that is all you have to do to have an impeccable lawn. Of course, water and fertilizer mixed under the Alaska sun results in dramatic blade growth. That results in the need for regularly scheduled mowings. Miss doing it every four days or so and the subsequent effort is much more difficult, clogging the mower, requiring some raking to spread the clippings and awfully messy (not to mention dangerous) in the rain.
Ours is a four-acre lawn. Even for a smaller one, the effort required to keep it "impeccable" is tremendous. You have to take care of the damn thing all the time. It takes over.
You can't let the kids or the dog develop paths in it. You cut fishing trips short because there is finally going to be a sunny day when you can mow. And you mow in the rain because you have to, as noted above. And when you see a yellow flower -- as inevitably you do (why else do you have to continually reapply even the chemical herbicides?) -- it is time to nuke the whole lawn.
Of course, I didn't know it back then, but the very thing I was using to keep my lawn pristinely weed free was not healthy. It wasn't healthy for the soil microbes or for the rest of the soil food web that existed everywhere around, but not in my lawn. I never saw a worm casting or a bird on that lawn. And it wasn't healthy for me, my family and probably those within a 75-mile radius of my spraying, more because I live in a windy area. That is how far these sprays can roam.
Then I saw the light.
I don't know if it was my children playing on the lawn (when I let them), my wife's breast cancer, realizing how much time (and love and hate, too!) I had wasted that could have been spent with the family or just keeping up with the ever-developing science, but I forced myself to give up the notion of a pristine lawn. I learned to live with weeds. I was extremely arrogant about hating them, so it wasn't easy. I still have the impulse to dig at them.
It helped to realize that lawns were merely moats between the castles and the woods that surrounded them so the occupants could see what was coming. They were filled with grasses, sure, but also herbs, annuals and wildflowers -- just no trees. Your lawn can be the same thing today. Full of weeds. When you mow it, however, it is green and all at one height. Your moat is complete. You can see your enemies, friends and animals approach.
Only when we entered the age of "better living through chemistry" (promoted by mind-numbing, repeated commercial messages), did lawns turn into an oasis of unnatural grass monoculture. Today we are learning what a lot of that chemistry (and the advertising for it) has done to us and our environment.
Today, I don't have a pristine lawn. But I do have a healthy one. Sure, it has lots of dandelions and there are really large patches of clover all about. But when I lay down a circle pattern on those four acres, you can't see them and it is a lawn worthy of writing about.
In fact, dear new reader, our non-pristine lawn has been featured in two John Deere magazine articles. I am pretty sure the previous owner would excuse me for turning his pristine lawn into one worthy of being on the cover of the Rolling Stone of lawn literature -- and would have be jealous at that.
So, to those who are new to owning a home in Alaska: A pristine lawn is out of step with the times. It is too much work to maintain one. It is anti-family and anti-environment. (It is neither sustainable nor maintainable as you get older, either.) If you want to make any lawn impressive, just mow it in a nice pattern. Don't worry about the weeds. I can't believe I am writing this, but life is short: Live on your lawn, not for it.
Jeffs Alaska Garden Calendar
Beer in the Garden: 6:30-9:30 p.m. Friday, July 10. A new event at the Alaska Botanical Garden features beer and live music from Silver Train Band and 2 Cent Acre. Tickets $35 in advance and $40 at the door; designated drivers $10. Limited tickets available.
Raspberries: Water.
Spittlebugs: Those little spitballs you are finding on wild roses and grasses are nothing to worry about. These small bugs pump air and water to create that harmless spittle.