Planting Grass as a Non-Professional

A lot of rain has fallen today, watering the patches and splotches of grass seed I flung out in the last few days and sprinkled over with straw. A professional grass planter once told me that birds will eat up the seed if you don't cover it with a 3-deep layer of straw. Three stalks deep. He said this is deep enough to deter the short beak of a bird. This is a terrible situation for a non-professional. In no circumstance can the straw covering your grass seed (already under surveillance by a Robin as you were flinging it out to start with) be 3-strands-deep. It is 1 deep or 24 deep or 7 deep, for the most part. So you leave your sense of precision in the house and shake out swatches of straw over seed as thin as you can and think no more about it.

Today is the only day of rain forecast for this week. I would so much rather have God water the grass seed than me, so I went to Menards. I bought up seed for shade and seed for sun (and cocoa bean mulch for the hasta bed and for the row of barberry bushes out front). The rain mounted to nearly torrential just as I left the store and the good natured worker in a yellow slicker came out to loft mulch bags into my trunk and back seat. (I have heard tell that they will not carry out purchases for male customers. My source confessed that he sometimes has his wife pick up things at Menards for this reason...to get a little help, after all.) The yellow-slickered man was happy to help, as I was to be helped. He said he spends most of the day muddy anyhow.

Once home, I saw the rain gutter over the porch was overflowing, so I was distracted from grass seed. I took an old wooden chair from the porch, which sunk into the earth 4 inches with two legs and 8 inches with the others as I put my new Wisconsin weight upon it. So I teetered and flailed and steadied myself with the gutter every time I moved the chair further down the line. It's good I didn't pull it off in the process. I have done this bare handed before and the decomposing leaves are some kind of caustic matter for the skin, so I thought I was clever to put on rubber gloves this time. I cleared the length of gutter along the back porch, which is all I could reach. Rain poured into the rubber gloves but I expected that and was not daunted. It pooled there until I reached up for more leaves, at which time the gloves were like a spout pouring water Into the sleeves of my raincoat, like tunnels to my armpits and beyond. Ah well. Now I was soaked inside the coat and out, I might as well stand in the rain and seed the rest of the lawn. I had been debating waiting til it let up...

For an hour I wandered the lawn, flinging grass seed over bare patches, bringing a pitchfork with a helping of straw, and shaking it over the new seed, aspiring to the 3-deep standard, until I was out of straw and interest both. If you can imagine being wetter than when gutters of rain pour down your armpits, I was that.

I walked in the kitchen door and peeled off my raincoat only to realize as much grass seed had stuck to the wet of my coat as perhaps lay out in the yard. It was like a strange work of art, rife with meaning just beyond my grasp, and it sprinkled across the kitchen floor. An artful mess.

Elias and the Gute found it interesting until they realized it was not tasty. They were in a desperate state. I had forgotten about the lamb meat cooking in the oven when I went to Menards. It is ground lamb with garlic and onions and marjoram and rosemary cooked slow at a low temp in a loaf and then weighted down while it cools to drain the fat and juices so it is oddly dense and then sliced thin for gyros. It's understandable that with two hours of slow-cooking lamb, Eli and Guthrie were hopeful concerning supper. We ate (them kibble, me lamb) and just when I thought the rain was letting up, it came down in torrents again tamping down the tufts of straw making all of my handiwork in the yard look more intentional.

It was not the dreary cold 56 degree day in May that it started out to be. In the end, with patches of straw across the yard lit in the setting sun, I felt like I'd had an adventure. And now a bath of Epsom salts and a little fragrant oil will make everything right... Acclimating, still, in Wisconsin.