GOING YARD

When we bought our first house just over three years ago, we were overjoyed to move out of our tiny one bedroom apartment and finally have a place of our own. A place to make our home. Ashley scoped out an amazing deal and our house hunting was over as quickly as it began.

We started looking at our future home at the end of a heavy winter and never saw the house with less than eight inches of snow on the ground before putting in an offer. As a result, there wasn’t much thought on what the lawn looked like (or even how much of it there was for that matter).

As spring rolled around and everything began to green up, we watched our home run ball turn foul. Turns out we had some dead grass…a lot of dead grass. We soon discovered that one of the zones of the sprinkler system was not wired into the control panel, so that sod never got any water. And so it began. Just over a month into our new home and we were ready to take on a pretty major lawn renovation.

Maybe it was being three years younger or the lingering excitement of having our own home project to do, but we made surprisingly quick work getting the dead sod removed, ground prepped, and starter fertilizer and seed spread all in a weekend. After that, it was time to water and wait.

Sure enough, about a week and a half later the green started to pop up. Success! Well, at least for a while. A long, hot summer and rocky, clay soil took it’s toll on the new grass and left it pretty patchy in the fall. With a little persistence, studying some valuable lawn care resources (available from the local research and extension website), and taking advantage of the free top-soil and compost offered by our city’s yard waste program, we’ve been able to fill most of those holes in. Now, here we are three years later. There’s still some work to do to create the softest, lushest lawn for Mya to play in, but looking back at those pictures of that first month, it is amazing to remind ourselves of how far we’ve come.