Seven Steps to Prepare Your Lawn For The Winter
It is that time of the year when the suburban man walks out his back door and surveys the prospect that Nature has laid before him.
Though now an autumn chill permeates the air and the trees are radiant with the season’s color, the memory is strong within him of the sights and sounds and scents of the season just passed.
The balm of the summer sun beaming down upon family gatherings.
The smell of summer foods being laid out for picnics, or being grilled upon the coals.
The scent of flowers, the buzz of bees, the soft scurry of the wind leaping from treetop to treetop.
The expanse of green lawn stretching away on all sides, new-shorn, melding with the other lawns on the block into a landscape of rolling greenery.
His thinking there on the back porch, the thinking of this suburban man, his thinking as regards the last item, the expanse of green lawn and what not, is that this must never happen again.
In a long and eventful life the suburban man has never known such a patch of ground that seemed to go on and on forever, and the cutting of it seems to reenact a tale from Ancient Greece mythology regarding a newly-departed soul who, upon arrival on the other side of the River Styx and looking forward to finally catching up on all his reading, is handed a lawnmower and told that he is now the Official Groundskeeper of Hell.
“No, no, I couldn’t really,” he protests, “surely there is there someone more worthy of the honor,” but he is told that it is either this or having his liver pecked out on a recurring basis by a pesky eagle, and so, after a lifetime of pushing a damned lawnmower around and thinking he was done with it, just look! Here he is at it again.
Back to street level, aboveground in other words, suburban man muses that he could have sworn throughout the summer that the front yard had already started to visibly grow again before he finished the back yard, and that the two side yards seemed to be in competition with one another as to which could reveal more hidden boulders, petrified tree roots, ankle-breaking mole or gopher or snake holes, or great sudden stretches of animal waste, with no clear winner between the two at summer’s end.
The lawnmower proper he has imbued with a dark spirit, as one superstitiously does with all destructive forces, one that is lying in wait for him, passing the time in malicious thoughts while the winter months roll by.
The Glowering Hulk, his pet name for the lawnmower, seems to be consoling itself with the thought that while it didn’t succeed in out-and-out separating the man’s yanking arm from its socket by suddenly seizing up on the pull cord with a mechanical death grip right as he put everything that he had into starting the damned thing, there is always next year.
Well, perhaps.
And perhaps not, for the man who takes proper preparations. Follow these simple steps. While no method is guaranteed, these can take you a long way towards lawn peace of mind.
1). Stand there and simply take a look at your lawn. Consider the chemical composition of the soil, the anticipated moisture content over the winter, the various predators inimical to grass.
Is the makeup of the soil becoming too acidic or too basic to sustain grass life?
Is the anticipated snowfall in the coming winter likely to wash away all grass life over the course of the colder months?
Are pestilential clouds of insects even now lifting off from remote regions of South America to wing their way here in order to render your lawn nothing but an expanse of brown dirt?
Good! Good!
Go back inside and have a cup of coffee.
2). At another time, walk around the yard in a thoughtful manner. You want to be prepared to capture your thoughts, so take a small notebook and a pen or pencil.
Bend down periodically as if greeting an old friend.
Scrape or pluck gently here and there at the surface of the lawn. You may wish to rub small portions of soil between your fingers.
You may examine particular leaves on the ground, holding them up to the light for a better view, and afterwards do the finger rubbing thing again.
You may pace off certain lengths of the lawn in several directions as though coming to an estimate of total square yardage.
If you are feeling particularly earthy, take time now to bring your fingers to your nose and smell the soil or the leaves, inhaling deeply!, as if exercising some ancient woodsman rite that makes you one with the substances, indeed, with Nature itself.
Take notes of all your observations, then go back inside and throw your notebook away. You can save the pen or pencil.
Have another cup of coffee.
These solitary wanderings play well with the neighbors and give the impression of an individual who is doing all that one man can to keep his lawn healthy.
If for the duration of the next decade or so green green grass simply doesn’t exist on his property, no one can say that it’s for lack of trying.
3). Study the array of trees on the property. Note how, directed by The Great Cycle of Life, they are shedding leaves, apparently by the millions.
These leaves fall in layers upon the ground, covering it so thickly that it seems unlikely that anything larger than a microbe could work its way through.
The underlying lawn is deprived of moisture, sunlight, air, nutrients, and all benign insect and animal life. It’s as though a damned mattress composed of some dense material has been laid over every surface of the lawn.
Go over to your trees – one by one! Do not stint on this stage! – and pat them gently, saying “Well done, good and faithful friend, well done.”
Find out what trees like. That’s what the internet is for.
They could like you to caper around them at midnight chanting haunting verses of mad worship. They may like a steady diet of martinis poured in concentric circles around their trunks. Whatever it is, do it.
4). Read in the paper that other lawn ‘experts’ advise mulching your lovely deep dark leaf cover and hauling away the proceeds so that your lawn can breathe through the winter months and renew itself.
You don’t know what this mulching is, but it can’t be anything good.
A quick guess suggests that this ought to take you only a few months of backbreaking labor, though if you want to meet that schedule you may need to set up floodlights in the back yard in order to work through the night.
Reflect that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you see what nonsense people are willing to say to get into the lawn section of the newspaper.
Pour sugar into the gas tank of anything in your garage smaller than a car just in case. It might be a mulching machine.
5). Do the dancing chant and martini thing around your trees again. You can’t be too attentive in these matters. Remember, Nature has set up a kind of Mixed Martial Arts competition between trees and lawns and the trees have won. Grass has been deselected for survival, clearly. Who are you to interfere with evolution?
6). See upon another quick review of the papers that some other damned expert is advising that you do some other damned thing to your lawn if you want it to grow lush and gorgeous next summer.
Cancel your subscription to the paper.
7). Your local library will have many interesting and informative books on lawn care with in-depth chapters on maintenance prior to and through the winter months.
Check them all out – clear the shelves of them! – and take them home and hide them.
You may need to visit adjoining library branches as well. They transfer books between branches these days you know.
Pay the late fees and fines through the entirety of the autumn and winter months. No price is too high for peace of mind.
Finally, your tasks are complete.
You can sit back and rest assured that you have done all that one suburban man can do to forestall and perhaps completely eliminate a lush, verdant lawn next spring, while saving yourself no end of hearty labor in the crisp fall air that for all you know will come close to near killing you.
It is a time for quiet reflection. A time perhaps to pour a martini and dwell upon the mysterious life force of Nature and how to quell it wherever it pops up.
While you’re at it, pour a few drinks for the pin oaks and maples out back.
It’s the least you can do to thank them for their efforts.
