Grass.

4-29-10 SHORT HILLS: We got 2.6 inches of rain in the three day storm. Since the rain stopped, it’s been cool, but warmer today, and windy, windy enough to shake branches out of the trees, but no real damage so far. I did more pruning and moved some overgrown flagstones to a new site.

It’s time for my yearly rant about grass. We live in NJ on the side of a hill, a mesozoic basaltic ridge actually. A hundred or so years ago, the hillside was a deciduous forest. The trees and soil soaked up heavy precip and the ecosystem was stable. Now we have suburbia with houses, streets, sidewalks, driveways, patios, terraces all of which shed rain water which pours down the hillside necessitating sewers. Most of the trees are gone, partly replaced by grass which absorbs less rain water than trees.

We are toward the bottom of the hill, and a lot of our topsoil has been lost to erosion in spite of terracing I have done to reduce and slow runoff. Grass grows poorly in our yard because it is heavily treed and thus shady, and because four big active dogs turn it into a parade ground.

The situation could be helped with tree pruning, top soil, sod, fertilizer, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, etc, but I won’t go there. Firstly, I’m too cheap, I prefer the trees as they are, I won’t use any –cidal chemicals because of those dogs, and ourselves, and fertilizer runoff contaminates rivers and streams.

As for top soil, the organic layer on the surface of the soil, there is a regular on-going deposit of organic matter happening—leaves, twigs, spent blossoms, bud casings, grass clippings which people rake up and take away. But not here, I let it all pile up, including the fall leaves, and let it decompose.

As for what grows in the yard, everyone is welcome as long as you can thrive at under three inches. Come on in! We do have some grass, plus crabgrass, dandelions, wild strawberry, clover, sorrel, onion grass, plantain, moss, ivy, virginia creeper and dozen of other weeds whose names are unknown to me.

About a year ago there was an article, I think, in the NYT about what the author, sorry I don’t remember the author’s name, called “freedom lawns”. The idea is to do what I do—nothing, and let it take care of itself except for mowing.

New blooms: honeysuckle bush, wild strawberry, wild garlic mustard, lily-of-the-valley.


"Freedom Lawn" Those trees are about to leaf and blot out the sun.

Why worry about grass when you can have an azalea?