It's been a struggle with our yards. It has never been as lushly verdant as some of the others in the neighborhood, but we (smartly) won't pay for lawn care service. This is one type of keeping up with the Joneses that I hope we never submit to.
However, it's bad, and I think it's been on the decline for the past two years. Then, there were so many weeds that Father wanted me to buy something to kill them with. I don't remember what I got, but it was so damn effective that not only did it kill the weeds in our front and back yards, it killed the grass surrounding it. I went all Vietnam on the weeds because there were so many, which meant that two summers ago there were massive swaths of brown grass and a number of bare spots. Whoops. I thought the government banned these types of pesticides.
So the following year Father decided to add new sod. He didn't tell me, and I kind of lost it. I wrote about it too. It didn't take. Probably a combination of not watering it enough and bad soil. The bare patches and brown grass remain to this day, even if we water.
But something new is cropping up: anthills. We've had them on the cracks of our driveway since I can remember. But starting in the spring, I think, I've noticed that they've formed right in the middle of my lawn. And there are a lot of them, both in bare and lush spots, in the front and back yards. I filed in the back of my mind the need, not pressing at the time, to figure out what's going on and what needs to be done about this.
Meantime, through the summer, I noticed an ominous thing: The grass isn't growing as fast as before, and there are many more brown patches on our lawns. In fact, many spots that should be overgrown with green grass that needed to be cut every two weeks looked to be wilting. I just chalked that up to not watering as much as we should (although the rainfall this summer has been average, maybe even above-average).
But I finally got around to thinking about those anthills and I went to the hardware store. That's when, as I was looking at the back of one of those pesticides (most of which have huge images of ants on the front, scary!) and saw one of the areas it recommends to put this poison on: areas that are dry and have moths flying from when you mow the lawn. Wait a second ... oftentimes when I mow I see these moths, and I think they're from the dry parts of the lawn. You mean it's not the lack of water starving the grass, but the ants killing them! Damn it, they must be stopped!!!
So now, even though I ain't no expert, I'm convinced the reason our lawn looks so awful is because the ants are invading our grass, and they soon may be trying to invade our house. The past few years we've seen ant attacks inside our house, but those were always in the spring, so I figure they're getting food after hibernating. No more. They've gotten too complacent. Whatever it is -- damn the environment -- I need to buy and use as many pesticides I can to kill the ants in our front and back yard and stop them from infiltrating the house.
I feel so like a Republican right now.
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