You’re all wondering how my new meadow project worked out, but you’re too polite to bring it up. I can feel it.
It was about this time last year that I looked at a strip of land running along the alley side of our house and thought: Almost anything would look better than that. We didn’t garden it. Sometimes we stuck our car back there when our local Alberta Street suffered from excess popularity and we could’t find a place to park on the street. Also that’s where our dart board was set up. Weeds blew in over the years, and it didn’t get out of hand because we didn’t water it one little bit. Every now and then we’d annoy it with the weed whacker. Pretty much, it was ignorable, and that’s what we did with it.
But it was right up alongside our back patio, where we entertain anyone who pops by and likes beer, whether we’ve met them before or not. There are container plants, there’s furniture, there’s a bird bath and feeder. And maybe it would be nicer to have something other than a dried-up weed patch adjacent.
A meadow, say.
That’s when I remembered the ecolawn we see on our rambles. It’s got daisies and stuff and otherwise acts like a lawn. I could get the required seed mix and sow it, just as soon as I got rid of the resident weeds. The seed mix people said that part was easy. Just water, stretch plastic over the area, and let it bake in the sun for six weeks. Then, lo! Everything you don’t want is dead and It’s ready to replant!
Lo! Six weeks later I peeled off the plastic and our weed patch was utterly transformed! Into the tallest, greenest, most luxuriant weed patch on the block! And that’s really saying something, since the house on the corner went over to AirBnB.
So I scavenged enough locally-sourced cardboard to put an appliance store dumpster to shame, and I carefully peeled off any tape and pried out any staples and spread it all out on the revived and resplendent weedpatch, and pinned it down with boulders and tools and slow children, and covered that with boughten compost a foot high, and God smote it with rain and darkness for seven months, and by gum, by May that cardboard was but a memory and the weed patch had disappeared. I relocated the excess compost and raked everything smooth and hand-broadcast my pound of Ecolawn seed. We’re roughly 92 Murr-hours into this thing by now.
It drizzled helpfully. I stared at my soil, willing seeds to burst forth.
Then for no reason other than pure obstrepory, it shot up to about a hundred degrees for days. I watered. I watered. I watered.
Two weeks later random patches of soil sprouted hopeful fuzz like down on a duckling. It looked like grass. And there are three kinds of grass and two clovers in the mix. I called up the ecolawn lady and whined. Where are my flowers? She instructed me, with what I would call a tone, to be patient. So for the next few weeks I aggressively stared patience into the soil and finally something else popped up. No idea what.
I began to make a study of the plant nubbins, demanding answers from the cotyledons, but they were coy. Ultimately the patch resolved into one cubic crapload of sweet allysum, some yarrow, three or four daisies, and not nearly enough baby blue eyes. Some weeds have crept in also, and I can’t pull them without stomping everything else, so except on the edges they’re still there. Plantain. Crabgrass. Lambs-quarters. One sunflower. And a plague of tiny Trees of Heaven.
Even overwhelmed by sweet alyssum, though, it did look better than the weed patch. There was still one thing missing. One thing I’d been waiting for: the little bunnies with calico frocks and big eyelashes. I could see them so clearly in my mind’s eye, last summer. My new meadow simply would not be complete without the bunnies.
We never really had any bunnies, though. Not until this year. My bunny showed up, naked and hungry. My bunny chowed down on sweet alyssum and tromped a crop circle into my meadow. My bunny still has eighty cuteness points to his credit before he becomes a deceptively handsome rat in my mind. Men can get away with that too.
I let the front garden go for several years, calling it the meadow next door. I got some meaningful looks from the homeowners association and eventually relented and mowed it down. The composition of the plants hasn’t changed all that much, just the height. Had bunnies very briefly until a neighborhood cat killed a nestful of babies.
I haven’t had enough bunnies yet to get over the cute. If they eat the rest of my yard I’ll reconsider.
That’s it!! I am coming to you and your garden. Have the beer ready;I prefer lagers.
Steve A
Bummer for you! I have only IPAs and the occasional stout!
Great to hear the full saga of the meadow project. I look forward to seeing it!
I thought the bunny was fake at first, then I read your words. He’s cute and much nicer looking than my fake ones. The meadow looks very nice now. You could probably toss in a few seeds of different coloured flowers and they’d come up next spring.
I wonder about that. It’s premixed for being Just Right for this area but I already have a rogue sunflower in there…
A few small stepping stones might help for wandering through the little meadow.
Good idea. Or, stepstools.
My father called deer “giant rats.” But we’ve been delighted by the doe with two fawns this summer. They regularly stroll across the front yard near the tree-line. One day we saw the doe crouching down with her hind end in the air, wiggling like a puppy inviting play. The fawns cavorted. They seemed so happy!
Now I have to spray that stinky, bad-tasting, soapy, hot-pepper deterrent on my poor potted nubbins of impatiens and geraniums, bitten off at the soil.
Those rats. Go eat some poison ivy.
They’re lucky they’re cute. But also they’re tasty…what to do, what to do.
That was me
To respond directly to your first paragraph, yes indeed, I was curious about your cardboard-meadow project. I think it is to neat that it actually *worked*!
I’ve done that, and yes, it does! I did it in small patches, a little at a time. But over time, I have NO LAWN. When my neighbors are out there a couple times a week, cutting their grass, then trimming the edges… I’m at home drinking, and saying to myself, “Will they EVER pipe down, so I can take a nap?!”
The sound of a manual push mower plus the smell of cut grass takes me back to my happy childhood. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Yeah, but my neighbors have the high artillery. Riding mowers. Weed whackers. Leaf blowers. And because they are performing all these tasks after a nice lunch, instead of taking a nap, like a decent person, they are disturbing MY nap! AND, I have read that the smell of cut grass is actually how grass communicates to its own kind; it’s a distress signal. No one I know has a push mower anymore. If you have a small yard, that’s doable… but everyone around me (including me) has big, honkin’ yards.
I don’t know how big “big” is, but I suspect a lot of people don’t realize how well those push mowers work. You can cover a lot of ground with one.
I empathize. I am trying to turn a sterile, dense clay yard into a semblance of an Oklahoma prairie. Planted about 40 different species via seed. Had an overabundance of plains coreopsis, which was gorgeous, but crowded out other desirables. After pulling haybales of it once it went to seed, my planned showpiece of a bed was pathetically sparse. I’m hoping many of the seeds will pop up next year. In other beds I’m finding some pleasant surprises, albeit only one percent of the seeds I actually planted. Next project, turning the lawn into native buffalograss. Your meadow might surprise you next year. Keep loving it.
It’s going to be much better than WHAT WAS THERE BEFORE!