There’s nothing that’s surprised me more as a home owner than that planting and nurturing a good lawn is very difficult. And by difficult I mean labor intensive, requiring lots of heavy equipment, and expensive. Have any of you looked at the price of grass seed?

From a person with a lawn that is mostly weed, let me assure you this stuff does not just take care of itself, as I naively assumed. There’s aeration. There’s fertilizer. There’s dethatching. And you can either break your back doing these activities on a large yard, or you can rent or buy large equipment that most likely has a gas engine which will need maintenance every year to do it.

About half of our three quarter acre yard was Honeysuckle and Rose of Sharon with a strong infestation of poison ivy. It’s been a slow process to attack it. We’ve probably cleared and reseeded lawn over about half of it. I am currently working a patch that’s getting toward the end of the hack all the roots out with a mattock phase and moving into leveling the ground to start seed sowing and fertilizing phase.

I will never look at a wrecked lawn full of invasive vigorous species in the same way again. If and when we buy another house, if we find something similar to what we had here? Unless I have 30 grand to throw at landscapers, I am saying no thank you.