Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
I was sitting on our front porch last week with my granddaughter Norah. That’s usually a job for her older sister Jayne, but at the wise old age of five, Norah is starting to hang out with grandpa a little more often.
We were doing something exciting, watching the lawn sprinklers in Zone 5 (our biggest zone) doing their magic at 7 am.
Watching four long-distance sprinkler heads work in circles around our oversized front yard might not seem exciting to you, but it was a nice break in the action for us.
Watching those Rainbirds work brought back a flood (yes, that’s a pun) of memories.
I built the house in 1995 with my friend Tad McMillan and our nephew Mark Smith. The lawn came in the following spring per emphatic instructions from Sue.
The English lawn has swept America from coast to coast. It was one of the first foreign innovations to hit the shores of the New World and I’m still not sure why we do it.
Lawn grass is the largest crop in America, surpassing corn, wheat, alfalfa, and any other crop in its geographic magnitude.
An estimated 40,000,000 acres of grass cover the lower 48 of the United States. Growing an average of three feet per year, that’s a lot of lawn to mow. Much of it fills landfills in black plastic bags, adding to the waste of a useful crop hidden in plain sight.
Renewable resources in the guise of corn and soybeans were big business during the Bush-Cheney Administration. As corporate oil men, I always thought that was a dodge for their corporate buddies who were busily jacking prices at the pump to an all-time high, but in a less cynical view, they may have been on to something.
Imagine if all those lawn clippings, from tens of millions of lawns stretching from Florida to Washington and Maine to Los Angeles, were gathered, placed in fermentation tanks, and turned into alcohol for fuel.
The impact of soybeans and corn converted to alcohol was insignificant, grass clippings would be a game changer. An acre of grass can produce on average 500 gallons of alcohol per year. In full production that equates to 20 billion of America’s annual average consumption of 135 billion gallons of gas.
Nope, it won’t happen. There would be the inevitable blowback from oil and gas producers since it would drastically affect their obscene profits. The work in alcohol production would be similar and not so erratic for people working in the energy field.
Every time I hear some vote-grabbing, money-grubbing politician rail against wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectric, or nuclear power I’m taken back to the 1890s and early 20th century.
There was the same blowback from buggy manufacturers, horse ranches, and leather tack companies against the automobile as there is now against alternative fuel sources.
Yes, that’s a stretch from having a conversation with a five-year-old as the sprinklers sprayed our feet on the front deck, but it’s the type of thoughts that can suddenly descend upon us when we’re least expecting them.
Our lawn is an enigma. It shouldn’t be there. When my grandparents owned the land, it was marginal pasture, better suited on the top for milkweeds and on the swampy bottom for cattails. I played with both as a small child on family vacations many decades ago.
Our hill is the perfect location for a gravel-crushing operation.
When Tad and I opened up the ground for the foundation during spring break back in 1995 we found river rock. Not the small, rounded stones, dotted with agates and petrified wood, though there is some of that in place, but large volleyball and basketball-sized mini-boulders.
This was once a riverbed, that is evident. Riverbeds are not suited for growing grass, and neither was this little section of paradise.
It made a great, solid foundation for the supportive concrete walls of the basement, but fescue wouldn’t grow well there.
I had to haul in topsoil, just to get grass to grow. I borrowed a tilt-bed, four-yard farm truck from Paul Leonhardt, and used the PTO driven front end loader on my International Super M tractor to haul 200 yards of topsoil from a location a mile away on Country Acres Road.
It took a long time to get four inches of soil to cover the boulder field.
I dumped the loads in piles, pulling away with the dump bed on the truck raised to fan out the soil. After 70 loads, I took the truck back to Paul and drove the tractor home.
Leveling with a blade behind a tractor is easy on an established road or a worksite, doing it on uneven ground filled with rocks is another story.
The dirt eventually spread out almost evenly. Some spots were 10 inches deep, and some only two, but a yard rake evened my rough blade work.
Brian and Staci remember the next step all too well.
With the dirt in place, I rented a ditcher from my buddy Bob Steen at Jiffy Rental. After laying out the path for lawn sprinklers I cut the trough a foot deep into six zones emanating from our well behind the house to the south edge of the property adjacent to Gasser Road.
I paid the kids a nickel a rock to clean up the trenches. They dropped them into a wheelbarrow.
When the wheelbarrow was full, I pushed into the field and fanned out the rocks. They went on strike, and I doubled their rate to a dime before we were finished.
Spreading the grass seed was easy with a handheld spreader. Tossing the straw to cover the seed was just about as easy.
We ran the sprinklers four times a day to keep the ground moist, and after a few weeks the lawn began to look like an old man’s bad hair day (yes, I can relate.)
A spot just east of the driveway wouldn’t grow anything. The soil was plenty deep, but I suspected I’d dug too deep at the other site and didn’t have productive topsoil in place.
I made a trip to the “Sod Father” operated by retired Riverton ag teacher Roy Reno and purchased 1200 square feet of sod.
My friend Clay and I laid it, and it took hold, establishing before the seeded grass was set.
Now 29 years later, I can look back with my energetic granddaughter, and watch her play with her older sister Jayne and her two-year-old cousin Morgan on the same lawn.
Life seems to come at you in spurts, jolts, and in periods of chaos and confusion, but live long enough and it just flows on like a lazy river.
I enjoy those river moments with my granddaughters more than anything else I’ve experienced.
Perhaps you too can savor moments similar to this on the chaotic highway of life.