A Tale of Two Lawns

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.