Tuesday, August 21, 2018

A note on the thickness of the lawn


It's really thick.

I mowed the lawn yesterday for what I think was the first time in two weeks, but maybe it was three. We've had quite a bit of rain since the last time I mowed - Joe Snedeker the meteorologist said this has been one of the wettest summers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, though I think this is less true for Nanticoke - and also a good deal of sun. The grass grew tall since the last time I mowed, but many individual blades seem to have also grown unusually broad. I wonder if this is a case of a different variety of grass becoming dominant and spreading across the lawn, or the same varieties simply expressing themselves differently.

It didn't rain the night before yesterday, as far as I could tell, but the grass was still lightly damp with dew at midday when I began mowing. The thickness of the grass meant many individual blades were in shade and did not dry out in the relatively weak sunlight, even as the day wore on. But the grass catcher kept filling up, and the deck kept clogging up, and the lawnmower blades kept getting bogged down. In the end it took me the entire day up to the loss of usable sunlight at 8 PM to finish the lawn. I had to stop to clear jams ever few minutes, and stop to empty the grass catcher about once every ten or fifteen minutes. What should have taken two or three hours took far longer, and the lawnmower consumed far more gasoline than usual.

We've had droughts in past years, bad ones, where lawns have gone dormant and turned crunchy and brown. This hasn't been one of those years. How many more sessions of mowing the lawn, I wonder, until the lawn is done for the season?

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