Getting a Meadow

Category: Meadowing | Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 12:42 am

OK, it's only been 10 months since my last (first) post. Hey, it's been a busy year!

Step one was to describe how I got the meadow, so here's that bit of background.

My son's 7th grade teacher, an incredible lady and truly engaging individual that I'm happy to know still and who continues to bring joy to all students she meets, informed my son that mowing lawns was BAD for the environment. Son immediately heads home and informs father, that would be me, that he is harming the environment with all the mowing and something must be done.

OK, says I, what are the alternatives to mowing? At which point, son describes the many benefits (per his teacher, no doubt) of a meadow and that HE would love to assist. Taking the bate, and being no shrinking violet from new challenges, I sprang into action to understand what the steps were to bring about such a thing.

I know you know how many resources are available online, so I won't bore you with a what I found, but suffice it to say that the steps involved first taking measurements of the property, making a plan (which my son really enjoyed doing), transferring the plan onto the ground (garden hoses work great for this), then proceeding with the de-grassing process.

This last step, I know now, is one of the most important and perhaps most difficult, since grass will grow anywhere it can and, despite the fact that I cannot CAUSE it to grow where I want it to, once it is established, killing it is darned difficult. [I will refrain from expletives.]

The next photos illustrate the dying process, but this took much longer than expected to get ready for the seeding process, which I will discuss next time.

[This is zoysia, by the way, and a grass I was not unhappy to lose. It's color is that same brown all winter long until well into the warm season. Though it appears to be only dying in one section, I ended up killing all of it so it would stop growing back into the garden spaces. With all the grass killer, I guess I wonder whether I really benefited the environment or not!]

Yours...in garden gloves.

Backyard at the start of the meadow conversion ( photo / image / picture from jb19012's Garden )

Grass dead, 2008 ( photo / image / picture from jb19012's Garden )

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Frank wrote on Sun May 29, 2011 10:19 am:

Is this the first time your son has shown an interest in gardening JB? What a nice, collaborative project :)

jb19012 wrote on Sun May 29, 2011 12:20 pm:

No, but as he moves through his teen years, his interest has waned. Gardening requires a bit more "big picture" thinking than a teen can sometimes muster. At first, working with Dad was enough inducement. Now that he's older, the lack of internal motivation to want to commune with nature along with his focus on other talents tends to make collaboration less frequent. I continue to remind him that this was his idea and hope one day he'll see it for what it is -- a chance to make the world a bit better. Sometimes the best action is to simply demonstrate responsibility and hope others notice. The failure of others to notice is not an excuse to be irresponsible. Someday my son will see this, I'm sure.

Thanks for visiting.

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