Spending The Summer Tending My Sickly Plant Pet

 

My lawn as seen through the smoky, hazy day from Canadian wildfires, makes me reflect on the irony of such a wasteful exercise as maintaining my fossil fuel dependent lawn.

A few weeks ago, we had sod laid down in our yard. This is something I never would have done if it hadn't already come with the new house. In all but a handful of climates, Kentucky bluegrass is a fickle plant that struggles to survive without a constant intravenous injection of water and fertilizer. The water bill for this month will likely be the better part of a hundred dollars spent on green that we can't eat. I feel like our age of every home owning American living like an English aristocrat of old should be at an end. Like the faux ruins of Roman temples rich elites used to build on their lawns called "follies", our lawns may one day be strewn with the ruins of the temples of our suburbanized estates as displays of our folly.

Yesterday, I spread a natural fertilizer with a large cow manure component. It sent me back to my years working on farms when the smell of manure on my clothes was a daily thing. Though I dislike using chemical fertilizers, I may resort to using some to give it a good start once it is established. It is a pet peeve of mine when riding bike around town to see excess chemical fertilizer and weed and feed spread across sidewalks, crunching under my bike tires, ready to run off to pollute the river.

The amount of time I have spent tending what I call "my sickly plant pet" would be better spent, in my opinion, tending a nice field of potatoes in the back yard or a "three sisters" (corn, beans, and squash) garden in the front. Another option would be a natural prairie-scape requiring little maintenance and no water. Why do we fight nature when it does such a good job? Unfortunately, the American lawn is so ingrained in the psyche that something so abnormal and unsustainable is considered normal. It would only be sustainable if we used America's biggest crop (the lawn) as grazing land for animals, but then it would require planting a different mix of grasses and plants. I have written in the past about how because of the perception of a lawn as "normal" neighbors might get upset and home values suffer if I do anything other than a lawn. My greatest dislike about moving back to being a homeowner is the series of expectations based on a middle class conformity that are placed on me. We own a home, but we are not really free to do what we want with it

With the high inflation-caused food prices, instead of filling my crawl space and freezer with garden produce, saving money and getting better quality food, I will instead be spending money on something that produces nothing but a Potemkin Village-like veneer kept propped up by twice or three times daily watering and regular injections of chemicals, much of which runs down the drain in the street. I would rather my water and fertilizer bill be put toward growing something that gives back for everything it takes. A small square of lawn is all we need, and the rest is a waste.