House report 30: Grass

A few Saturdays ago Jeff and Adam dug out the sprinkler lines in the front garden. It was an exploratory excavation which quickly turned into the realization that it wouldn't take too much to fix... by the end of the day they had dug new trenches, run new sprinkler lines in the front parkway, levelled it and seeded it.

Did you know that grass seed takes an insanely long time to grow? It was 10-11 days before even the first shoots appeared, and it was looking nothing like proper grass. We were watering diligently and not much was happening. It was very disappointing.

A couple of Saturdays later they did the lawn section on the side of the driveway and the little parkway strip over on that side - in the course of which we lost the last section of pathway that we had! When the sprinkler lines are under the pathway I guess you have to dig it up!

And two Saturdays ago it was the turn of the back garden. There was always one pathetic little sprinker in the middle that didn't work... so Jeff and Adam dug out new trenches all over the yard, and fitted out the back lawn with new sprinklers. We turned lots of mulch in to the desert sand in the hope of getting some organic goodness into it, and made a giant mess.

Supervision is important...

At the end of the day we were faced with the problem of how to level it... and Jeff came up with an ingenious solution! We loaded the littles on to a pallet and dragged them around and around the garden until the ground was nicely flattened! They loved it, but it was exhausting!

Inspecting our work.... see that working sprinkler in the middle?!

By this point I think Jeff had become disillusioned with the rate of grass growth, because while he was out of town the following week he ordered two giant pallets of sod, which showed up on my driveway on concert day. So last Saturday (after two tiring concerts the night before, and participating in Community Service Day in the morning weeding the park) we laid sod in the back garden. It was back-breaking work. That stuff is really heavy! Adam and I moved it from the front to the back and Jeff laid it. And it is a quite astonishing transformation!

Before

During

EXHAUSTED! 

After!

If you look carefully you will notice that the retaining wall at the back has changed direction. We did that too - knocked the old one down and started to build a new one with more room so that we can put a tree in back there.

We're not allowed to walk on the grass for a month - a month! - which is proving challenging for the kids. But hopefully our grass will last! And when we were done, we had enough left that we went and laid it over our growing grass on the parkways out front too.

The front garden is still a heaving disaster of weeds and bare dirt and dead trees... but at least we're getting somewhere everywhere else!