Home Turf: The Perfect Suburban Lawn
10,000 pounds of soil were dumped in her front yard. The start of a thrilling lawn saga...
By: Janet Fu
“Don’t feel bad if the grass doesn’t grow. Our neighbor across the street works at the University of Arkansas Agricultural Extension, and he even struggles to get his Bermuda to grow,” chuckled Mrs. Brick as she paused in front of my house while walking her golden retriever, Cici. Hospitality radiated through her demeanor, and she was in no rush, characteristic of all suburban Southerners on a weekday evening during the dog days of summer.
My family had been trying for the last 12 days to grow grass. Yes. Grass. How hard can it be? Crabgrass crops up in sidewalk cracks under the blistering sun, acres of pastureland dot the roads 10 minutes from my house, and let us not forget Arkansas used to be a mix of temperate deciduous forest, prairie grasses, and alluvial plain. So why was I struggling to get blades of tall fescue to show their pointy heads above some topsoil?
Earlier in the spring, my parents had received emails, and then an angry, typed notice alerting them that our home “was not up to curb-appeal standards” and was “deteriorating the value of the neighborhood.” Three mature oaks, two maples, multiple hollies, and one tree which I still cannot identify grace our front lawn and prevent sunlight from reaching beyond their canopy, which keeps our heating bill down in the summer but also keeps our lawn perpetually threadbare —a patchwork quilt of eroded sandy soil and crisscrossing roots. Our Homeowner’s Association decided that enough was enough, and that a warning was in order.
Enter me: A 20 year-old college student synonymous with free manual labor to my parents. After a quick quota to a landscaping company produced an estimate of $6,600 for a half-pallet (22 rolls) of sod, my mom balked and decided it was time for me to roll up my sleeves. She called into White River Nursery and ordered 10 tons of topsoil. When it arrived in a MAC dump truck, the truck shuddered as it jumped the curb and the ground shook as all 10,000 pounds of earth was ignominiously dumped into our front yard. You know the phrase, “don’t make a mountain out of a molehill?” Well, this looked like a molehill if it was scaled up to a mountain. My mom promptly went to Lowe’s and purchased a five cubic foot wheelbarrow for $99, and sent me into the front yard under the baking August sun to level the soil, seed it with tall fescue, and cover the new grass seed with straw.
Throughout this process, our neighbor, Paul, kept coming up to us and offering remarks such as:
“That much soil won’t be enough. Better order double.”
“You need more straw. And finer straw. I like the EZ straw stuff, I buy it by the bale at Lowe’s and it works like magic for keeping the moisture in. Lay it on thick and make sure you water a lot.”
“Tall fescue, now, that is a good choice. I like a Bermuda and tall fescue blend myself, everything under my trees is tall fescue and it tolerates the shade. But you have to mow it at a higher trim height, and it doesn’t propagate at all or spread as much as the Bermuda.”
Paul was a retiree who wore a gridded, collared short sleeve shirt and jeans every day, with his phone in the left breast pocket. He had thinning white hair but yet still shockingly blue eyes and spent the better part of every day patrolling the perimeter of his property, picking up offending sticks, making sure the bushes and garden were perfectly manicured, and filling his bird feeder.
After growing up in my house for the last 16 years, I had learned that he was a resourceful man who harvested the chestnuts from his stinky tree after it blossomed every spring, a man who loved his grandkids when they came to visit for Thanksgiving, and was someone who waved hi to me every time I ran laps around our neighborhood to train for track and cross country. Most of all, I learned that while he was a gentleman, he was a pedant with a penchant for keeping order.
Once, I was running in the morning and encountered him taking a morning stroll. He ducked some low branches that were blocking the sidewalk next to a house with a “For Sale” sign. A few hours later, as I was studying in my room, I looked up and saw him walking by, a long saw with an extension pole in hand. The next morning when I ran, the low branches were gone.
Paul was someone who I both appreciated and who made me irate — someone who had too much spare time on his hands and now enjoyed the fruits of his labors after living out the suburban dream of the seventies.
Regardless, my parents took his advice, set up automatic sprinklers, and layered on the EZ straw.
A few days into the watering, tiny thin blades of grass erupted from the straw, looking like a baby’s first hairs. My parents celebrated.
The third day, the city passed an ordinance discouraging the watering of lawns and filling of swimming pools because rainfall had been sparing in July and August and they were preparing for an extended period of drought. All unnecessary household activities that required water were to cease, including, but not limited to;, car washing, lawn watering, and swimming pool filling.
When Paul took his daily stroll that day, he came up to my father and I and said, “I don’t know if you folks know, but the city passed an ordinance today prohibiting lawn watering. Such a pity with your newly planted grass, but I wouldn’t want you all to get in trouble or be reported.”
My parents wrung their hands in despair.
“It’s against the law!” protested my dad.
“Yes, but we just spent $1,000 on topsoil, another $100 on supplies, and $250 on grass seed! We can’t just let that go to waste!” retorted my mom.
So we hatched a plan to water the lawn at 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., when the neighbors would be asleep. My dad justified it by saying that it would be dark and therefore evaporation would be less than in the heat and sun of midday, which would be better for the grass and also less detrimental for the city’s water supply.
So we continued to water, in secret, and the grass grew taller and thicker day by day. Neighbors who had been curious about our topsoil mountain started commenting on the grass, and congratulating us on our success.
When we told Mrs. Brick, one of our closest family friends in the neighborhood, our secret, she laughed and said, “You all aren’t the only ones. We walk Cici every night around nine, because it’s too hot for her during the daytime, and everyone’s sprinklers are going at that time.”
So I thought I had victory over the suburban lawn, and I had defeated our HOA for good.
I returned back to school at the end of August, and my mom texted me photos as periodic updates of the lawn.
All seemed well and the grass seemed to be flourishing. But, one day,my dad called me in some distress, telling me that the grass seemed to have just “evaporated.”
I huffed, “What do you mean? Evaporated? Did you forget to water the lawn and did the grass wilt? Is it brown and dry?”
“No, no. It just disappeared! The grass isn’t there any more! The thick blades that were there yesterday are now just thin wisps!” cried my father.
I was incredulous. “Matter doesn’t just disappear! Did deer eat the grass? Did you water it? Is the grass dead?”
“Well, it’s certainly not there!”
And that was how my perfect suburban lawn fell prey to brown patch, a common fescue fungal disease that occurs when nights are humid and warmer than 60F. Leaves of the fescue roll up inward as they are taken over by the fungus, leaving behind bare and brown patches on the lawn. Brown patch disease typically happens in mid to late summer, caused by watering the lawn at dusk and the resulting heavy moisture and condensation that occurs overnight. The 10 p.m. automatic watering time? A death sentence.
Some people say the American Dream is dead. I say, the American lawn is dead. The perfect suburban lawn is dead.