K. Close III

Every time it grows out, we just cut it back again…

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 | Home

…in which I talk about being a homeowner and lawn care.

I have a love hate relationship with my yard and the environmental factors that effect it. It needn’t be said that I am, at my core, a fairly lazy person. That, and in my more recent years, I have become a significantly less shallow person as well. Arguably, I was never exceedingly shallow, but there are moments in my memories that I regret because I know that my personal sense of aesthetic ruined possibilities that now lie in an alternate universe. That being said, I still hate what all of this means to my front yard.

I first became aware of this about 10 years ago, when we first moved into the rental house. Rental houses are like a trial run for homeownership. Are you going to care about the upkeep of your home or are you going to drive that fucker into the ground and let the landlord deal with it when you bail out? Problem was, no matter how much we tried to love that house, it was still a rental, and we weren’t the ones to first treat it that way. It had a cracked foundation that flooded the bedroom any time it rained more than an inch. That wasn’t it’s only problem, but we did put some time and effort into it. Still, it was a rental house in a rental neighborhood and curb appeal was a very tertiary concern to us. We swore that, when we moved into our new house, the one that was ours alone, we’d do more to make it presentable.

Here we are, now, in our own house… the house that, every month, we throw money into a hole (our mortgage interest) in order to climb one rung higher toward owning it completely and entirely. When we bought it, the yard was gorgeous, with thick grass and perennials lining the walks. Since then, the flowers have died, the monkey grass that was meticulously managed is now randomly sprouting up all around the yard, and the grass, well, the grass is receding from the house like male pattern baldness. We still have a decent stretch of grass right along the road where it was re-sodded a few years back after some municipal plumbing work, but the rest has faded away from years of abuse and mis-treatment.

We don’t have any kind of irrigation system, and it’s a lot of work (for a lazy soul like myself) to drag a sprinkler around the yard, so for most of the summer, we don’t water. It could be said that I don’t mow often enough, either, but truth be told, when you don’t water, the grass doesn’t really grow enough to need mowing. Over the years, our lawn has become one of the saddest on the street. It’s not a travesty, as we are fortunate enough to not have to deal with a homeowner’s association, but the fact remains, that our front yard has become, admittedly, an eyesore. The trees have grown out of control, the shrubs have become nothing but scraggly twigs, and I needn’t reiterate the fate of the flowers. Even the pecan tree that we planted as part of a Keep Denton Beautiful project surprises me every year when it proves once again that it still isn’t dead.

So this year, ignoring the fact that we are poorer now than we’ve likely ever been, we decided to get on the TruGreen train and are now getting Chemlawn treatments to try and help. While this treatment is, in part, responsible for the state of green that our house once featured back when we bought it, our service men leave us notes as to what we need to do, as homeowners, to make sure the treatments work. Like changing your diet to work in tandem with those cholesterol pills, we still need to water every ten days or so, we need to prune the trees to let more light get to the grass, and I imagine getting some new sod or at least grass plugs would probably make for some serious re-growth.

Fortunately, my chores are occasionally taken care of for me from time to time. Whenever it rains, I delight in the fact that nature once again has taken care of one of my more dreaded chores, and simultaneously dread that fact that I will just have to mow that much sooner. Recently, we had some serious wind storms hit the area and they ripped several branches out of the trees which equates to less pruning, but now I have to clean up the debris. It’s a never ending cycle of either preventative or reactive maintenance. But at least we have that brand new mower that’s no more powerful than the old one, but at least it doesn’t have any holes in the deck.

It’s not so seldom these days that I think about what an old friend and financial planner advised us as he retired from the university. Never have more debt than you can pay at the end of the month and never own a house. Now, if only we hadn’t painted that incredible mural in Ansel’s room.

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