Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Monday, June 1, 2009

With torrential rains the past two weeks, my lawn’s grass has been shooting up almost as fast as my 11-year-old son, Henry, who seems to be outgrowing shoes, pants, and socks on a daily basis. Or I should say the lawn has almost gotten away from Henry, since he’s the A-No. 1 lawn service for our Sunflower House.

When you get into lawn-troubles, it helps to have a generous gardening guru as your close neighbor. So Joe Lamp’l, aka Joe Gardener, the author, television personality, and all around good guy, who happens to live a few houses down the street from me, comes forward with a gracious offer to lend a couple of alternates for us to try out.

Let me back up. Henry is a brave soul who normally mows our lawn with an old-fashioned push mower, which takes a lot of elbow grease, not to mention gulps of water. He earns the sum I pay him to perform this onerous task every couple of weeks in these warm grass-growing months. (In my affluent neighborhood almost everyone else — even families with Henry-age kids — springs for a lawn service. But I’m a well-known tightwad and eco-freak who’d rather keep the money in the family and do as little damage to our atmosphere as possible.) But this time, since the grass had gotten away from us, it called for an emergency rescue operation to bring the grass down to manageable levels.

So our neighbor Joe lent us his chargeable mower, which had charged just long enough to cut a few rows of grass before it sputtered out. Henry was frustrated as he was eager to make some tracks in the lawn on the weekend. So yesterday, he trekked back over to Joe’s and called in the heavy artillary. Joe gave him use of the gasoline-powered mower. Boy was it rough. You had to pull and pull on the chain just to get it going, then once you did, it was like pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks up a hill. It was loud and noisy and spewed gas fumes right into your face. Henry tried it and so did I — long enough to know we wanted no part of it.

There was a silver lining however, as there is in most situations. The gas-powered mower is outfitted with a bagger, so we were able to capture enough grass clippings to get a start on a layer of nitrogen-fixing mulch for the garden. At the end of the day, though, Henry and I decided to plug in the electrically charged mower and wait till Monday (today) to finish the job. While I remain committed to the old-fashioned push mower, which is without a doubt the most eco-friendly product on the market, I’m now certain that the second best choice is the rechargeable mower. It’s quieter and lightweight, and you don’t have to breathe in noxious fumes when you’re out in the heat.

Spending time mowing makes me consider expanding my area of native vegetation — that portion of the lawn that you don’t mow at all!