Mowing the lawn this past spring, I stopped short when I saw a little patch of grass, the kind you might say Wow, I wish my whole lawn looked like that! It was dense, it was short, it was a pretty shade of green, and the blades were narrow but not too narrow, just like I like. It was a couple weeks since I mowed that spot, and that little patch of grass was still short and even. I shut the mower down right there so I didn't lose the spot, went up to the house and got a shovel, scooped up a bit of that precious green patch, and planted it in my garden where I could keep an eye on it.
It used to be a farm, where I live, a cow farm. I don't know if they ever planted lawn grass after they built the house, or if people just mowed what was there and it started looking like lawn. But I know that beyond the rock wall, where I found my precious little green patch, it wasn't mowed when I moved in. Looked like it hadn't been mowed, ever.
I'm there now 10 years or more, and mowing beyond the wall since the start. It looks like a lawn now, mostly. But it's patchy, a little of this, a little of that. That's why I look it over when I'm mowing, looking for things I like and don't like about the different patches of lawn. And when I saw that patch of short grass, I knew that was what I wanted.
Most people would buy some grass seed and "overseed" their existing lawn, or just hire somebody to make it nice. Me, no. I'm gonna dig up a little bit of it and grow my own lawn from scratch.
//
The bit of lawn that I dug up was about a four-inch circle. (About four inches, but not really a circle.) I measured it this morning, in the garden: It's a foot square. (More than a foot, but not really square.) Across the long points, 20 inches by 24, where it's reaching out with runners to take over more territory. So it's fast-growing.
No, that's not right. It is fast spreading. I could take my 12-by-12 clump, tic-tac-toe it into nine little four-by-four squares, plant the squares a foot apart, and a year from now have nine, maybe 10 square feet. After another year, 90 or 100 square feet. After four more years I could cover a couple acres. Two or three years after that, maybe the whole county.
Hey, I'm retired. What else am I gonna do? (But not the whole county!)
//
I didn't tell you the best part. It's fast-spreading, but not fast-growing. When I got back to that original patch of grass with my shovel, I mowed it before digging up a sample. So it was 2½ inches tall when I transplanted it to the garden. That was back in May. Five months have gone by, and I didn't mow it again after transplanting it. Didn't mow it for five months. I measured it this morning: It's five inches tall. In five months it only grew 2½ inches.
It grew half an inch a month. Oh yeah, that's what I want. I'm doing it. I'm doing my whole yard.
