Thursday, May 20, 2010

It will only take a few minutes

That is my mantra.  My really bad mantra.  It is how I end up over committed and kind of on the edge most of my waking moments.

You all know about how dandilionfied our yard was.  Fortunately those little suckers only bloom for a couple of weeks and now they are gone.  But the evidence of our battle still remains.  Like blood and dead bodies scattered all over our front lawn.

Although I blogged about it and joked about it- it really did bug me having all those blowies in our yard.  A few I don't mind- seriously.  Maybe a hundred or so in the whole yard is not a problem for me.  But we had thousands, and it looked ridiculous.  And I felt like I should bake casseroles and cookies for the neighbors and deliver them with apology notes.

So I bought the crap.  You know- that giant huge bag of crap that covers something or other total square feet that sounds like a WHOLE lot and surely this will be enough- yeah, that bag.  It was so heavy I thought my eyes would pop out trying to move it around.  And then I dug around in the barn, that has been known to house 'critters', until I found that spreader thing that I bought years ago when I was on one of these binges.

And one evening- in between working and running the kids to the ball fields- I decided it was time.  I loaded up those millions of tiny pearl balls into my spreader and off I went. 

It became very apparent that our yard was larger than the thousands of square feet that were listed on the bag as I was running out quickly.  There are settings on my spreader- but who knows what those are actually for and moving them around haphazardly didn't seem to make a difference either way.  And I'd already spent $40 on this stuff- I didn't want to have to #1 go back to Meijer for more and #2 spend forty more dollars.

Think Mynde think.

So I began running.  No joke.  This way and that way- trying to at least drop these pellets on the worst patches of dandelions patches in our yard.  Across the middle, around in a little circle, back down the front, around the side, through the edges.  This continued until I did in fact run out of balls of magic. 

And then it was done.

I put the spreader back in the barn, wiped the sweat from my brow, loaded the kids in the car and off we went to the ballpark.

Came home 2 hours later- no change.  Next day- no change.  The next week- nothing.  Week and a half- nada.

That stuff doesn't work.  Or so I thought.

Slowly HUGE patches of dead grass began popping up.

And- we now have the most designful yard of the neighborhood.  It is our standard light green lawn with mixed in clover and other weeds with a slight overlay design of dark green swirlies.  No joking. (no picture either- I'm actually pretty embarrassed so I am NOT going to share this with you).

We're hiring a lawn company.  It's what I wanted to do in the first place.  Now I think Dan is on my side as well.  It just took a little persuasion- and a half dead lawn.

2 comments:

Ronda said...

This may be worth a drive by...

Anonymous said...

Too funny. This reminds me of when I fertilized our lawn in Lawrence and didn't realize the when I walked uphill that the little pearls did not drop out of the spreader. So our lawn was actually striped! Pictures were not permitted of my lawn either. Elaine.