I have a new appreciation for the saying, “The grass is
always greener on the other side.”
Yes, I understand the phrase is a metaphor
for not appreciating what you have and always thinking that someone else has it
better.
But recently, I’ve had an experience where in fact the grass
has been greener on the other side.
Growing up in Utah, which is considered a desert, we had to
water our lawn or it would die. My mom had a cool timer that she would set to
remind her to move the hose which was watering the lawn. The timer looked
something like this:
I always thought the middle part of the timer looked like a
spaceship, but then again those were the days when Star Wars had just come out.
When my wife and I moved to Idaho, the house we bought didn’t
have a lawn—just dirt and weeds. (It was also in a desert type environment.) I
tilled the lawn using only a shovel and planted grass seed. A lot of watering
and time later, we had a really nice lawn.
On a side note, last year we visited Idaho and drove by our
old house. The person that owns it now stopped watering the lawn, it is back to
weeds and dirt. It broke my heart.
North Carolina has its own unique issues with lawns.
Generally, our winters are very mild and the summers can be brutal.
Our house in North Carolina had a lawn, but there were
patches where it was just dirt, or what I thought was dirt. I’d grown a lawn
before, so I figured, “Heck, I can do this.”
I tilled the yard, planted grass, watered … and nothing. If
anything, things got worse. I was baffled.
Turns out our lawn was mostly clay, and not dirt. Also, I
planted fescue grass, a type I used before, and it doesn’t like the heat very
much. It fact, it dies out pretty quickly during the summer unless you water it
all the time, especially in NC.
I ended up tearing up the front yard, adding topsoil, and
put in a different kind of grass: zoysia. It was a grass type I’d never heard
of before.
Basically, the grass withstands the summers really well and
requires very little watering on my part. Most of the time, the regular
rainstorms we get do the trick.
There is one aspect of zoysia grass I’d not experienced
before. It goes dormant, or “to sleep” in the winter. Meaning, it turns a shade
of tan. It doesn’t look bad, just different.
And that brings me back to the grass is always greener. You
see, my next-door neighbor has fescue grass in his front yard. During the
winter, when my lawn is tan, his is bright green. He’s even mowed it on
Christmas Eve.
Yet when summer rolls around, his lawn dies. Like dead,
kaput, gone. It turns to dust. (It doesn’t help that he won’t water it.) Then
each autumn, he reseeds and starts all over again.
So, in the hottest months of the year, my lawn is rockin’.
It’s green, thick and beautiful.
In the end, depending on the season, the grass is truly
greener on the other side.
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