the "before"

Last year, our backyard lawn ended up being a bit of a disaster. It was a group effort of ignorance and laziness: we were too lazy to mow, and then when we did mow I did not rake the clippings off the grass — which is fine in theory, if you mow every other week or so (and is, in fact, recommended as a good organic amendment), but is not fine if you don't because then the clippings are too long and suffocate the grass. (I didn't know this at the time; that's where the ignorance comes in.) So then we had a lawn of dead grass and opportunistic weeds ... which, when we finally got around to weeding, turned into a lawn of dead grass and, uh, dirt.

Mostly dirt.

After we resolved that the grass was probably never coming back (Pd pointed out that there were specks of green; I pointed out, with due fatalism, that those are not grass), we decided to start over. So we went to Lee Valley this weekend and bought a garden weasel, which is this sharp, rotary thingy that is sort of like an aerator and tiller, but less frightening and not a power tool. I'm not sure how else to describe it. And then we bought a bunch of top soil for grass, and grass seeds — which we carefully and fastidiously chose after 10 minutes of reading the backs of bags at Canadian Tire¹ — and Pd spent an hour or so of Easter Sunday re-doing the lawn.


This is the "before." (The right third of the lawn had already been experimentally Weaselled; the rest of the lawn looks like that now, but with 100% more grass seeds.)

Anyway — here's hoping that the "after" will be suitably, drastically different.

¹Okay, to be fair, I had also read a book on organic lawn care and several articles and sections-of-gardening books on how to re-seed a lawn first. The problem was that, while we did not want to go the chemical-dependent route, we also did not have the patience for the wholly organic, seed-only-native-grasses route — mostly because I have no clue where to research and decide upon the proper combination of Canadian turf grasses, nor where to buy each subspecies of hardy non-Kentucky blue. (The books say that each bag of grass seed — even conventional grass seed — should come with a list of grasses included in the mixture. They lie.) So we've decided to split the difference: conventional grass mixture and top soil (but no chemical fertilizers), and then organic care thereafter (including, probably, Dutch clover infill).