Welcome to my jungle

One of the best things about living in Western North Carolina is that those of us who call these mountains home get to enjoy all four seasons. That’s also one of the worst things about living here—especially if one has a yard to maintain.

Four seasons of weather means four seasons of landscaping, planting, mulching, pruning, aerating, fertilizing, mowing, weed-whacking, edging and raking. As James Taylor might have sung if he wasn’t rich enough to afford someone else to take care of his yard, “Winter, spring, summer or fall, all I get to do is crawl… out of bed on the weekend to tackle the yardwork.”

The cycle begins early every spring, when suburban homeowners go into a flurry of activity. An intense desire to keep up with—or outdo—the Joneses, whose lush lawn rivals the fairways of Augusta National in terms of breathtaking verdancy, drives the frenzy along with those incessant Lowe’s commercials and ubiquitous ads featuring an annoying Scotsman braying for us to feed our lawn, FEED IT!

Inevitably, March machinations result in a multitude of May, June and July mowings. After applying fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and all those other cides in an effort to beat back the crabgrass and clover and foster the fescue, missing just one weekend wielding the Briggs and Stratton-powered blades of fury cues Guns ‘n’ Roses: “You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby!”

I often find myself wishing I had the same attitude toward lawn-care I enjoyed early in my tenure as a homeowner: As long as it’s green and nontoxic and has no thorns, who cares if the vegetation in the yard is merely weeds? Just mow it short … and squint when you look at it. As the wise sage Homer (Simpson) once said, “There’s nothing wrong with crab grass. It just has a bad name, that’s all. Everyone would love it if it had a cute name like ‘Elf grass.’”

Of course, there was the time when Mother Nature had other plans for my weekend of labor, as several days of heavy rainfall washed the lawn improvement chemicals out of the yard, down the hill and into the woods behind the house. At least we had the greenest poison ivy in the neighborhood. Somehow I don’t think the Joneses found themselves the least bit envious.

The outdoor workload increases incrementally when summer gives way to fall and the yard chores begin to multiply like rabbits on Viagra. Early fall is the worst, when the mighty oaks drop their acorns and the grass continues to grow. It happens at least once a year—I’ll be mowing the lawn and an acorn will fly out from the rear of the machine and pop me square in the, ahem, acorns.

Then, after the first frost, it’s time to dust off the leaf-blower and the rake. My approach used to be to wait until every last leaf had fallen and then rake—once, and only once. With the tall oaks and hickories that surround our house providing welcome shade during the heat of summer, however, that strategy just won’t work anymore. The massive mounds of flora flotsam and jetsam get so huge that the gas-powered blower won’t budge them, the wooden handles of the rakes splinter beneath the weight, and the blisters on my hands have blisters.

So each week of autumn I wage an epic battle of man against nature. Usually, nature wins. Every blast of wind sends hundreds of leaves spiraling to earth, and I, like a suburban Sisyphus, am condemned to spend eternity raking and blowing leaves off the lawn only to see them replaced tenfold the next day.

Winter offers no respite, as I find myself shoveling 18 inches of what the weatherman called “80-percent chance of rain” from the driveway and tending to our decorative landscaping. We added a pondless water feature to our backyard a few years ago. While the artificial (although quite realistic) waterfall is practically maintenance-free, when temperatures plunge to sub-Arctic levels, I bundle up like Nanook of the North, venture out onto the frozen tundra with a mattock in one gloved hand and a bucket of hot water in the other to bust up and/or melt the ice and get the waterfall flowing again. The neighbors probably think I’m burying a body in the backyard like a scene from “Fargo.”

Only now, after a few decades worth of four seasons worth of lawn-care labor, have I finally reached the logical conclusion—the best tool to deal with landscape issues in the mountains is the checkbook. Just pay somebody else to do it.