Me and the Weeds

Like most other things about suburban life, my lawn is a subtle conflict zone.

Part of me would be happy with a meadow for a lawn, but social expectations--and regulations, since we are a part of a homeowners association--demand that we maintain an artificial monoculture of short, approved grass in the zone between house and street. And of course I don't want my property value to suffer, so there's that.

So we mow regularly and try to practice some organic recycling principles by leaving the clippings to decompose. That's not a big deal.

The weeds are the real issue.

I tend to admire weeds, in the abstract. These organisms look at a blank lawn of pampered, rarefied grass and see an opportunity. Jared Diamond points out that monoculture cropland and suburban lawn environments are essentially kept in a state of constant trauma: such a wide swath of single-species plants is only possible in nature after some cataclysm (a flood, a fire) has wiped the land clear, and then only for a short time before other species move in. Only with constant human input do crops and lawns maintain their quite unnatural existence.

Weeds are survivors. Evolution has made them superbly adapted to the opportunity a lawn presents. They send out roots and runners overnight, grow absurdly fast, seed gratuitously. It's easy to marvel at them.

Still, I can't just let them take over the lawn. I don't live on a farm; I can't have a meadow behind the mailbox. I live in a suburb.

During our first spring here I tried a fully manual approach, pulling weeds as I saw them. I could easily spend an hour on a Saturday afternoon yanking henbit and crabgrass and worts and so on. Most of the time I might even make some noticeable progress. But a few days later, after an evening's rain, the yard would be back to a weed nursery. Leave any strand of root, and they'd be sprouting again overnight. They grow in thick mats, spreading over the surface, roots loosely clinging enough to suck up moisture and pump energy into leaf-making. Looking closer as I yanked handfuls, I noticed tinier plants down low, the next generation waiting they're turn. My weed-pulling began to take on a futile tone, like trying to clear seashells from a stretch of beach.

To some extent the problem dies down in the summer; the grass grows quickly and seems to compete with if not completely crowd out most weeds.

I began thinking about my strategy for the following spring. Pulling alone seemed ridiculous and a little too pious, like I was trying to embody some noble-but-bogus path of virtue: the nonconformist in the herd, the subversive suburbanite. But on the flip side I didn't want to go the "professional" route and either douse the lawn regularly with weed-killer/grass-feed (an unholy combination, it seems) or farm out the job to a suburban lawn outfit charging up to $400 a year to magically eradicate and banish weeds. And they do, too. Some of my neighbors have lawns that look like shaggy Astroturf, Disneyish and a little too garish, like they're trying to convince passers-by of health and vitality. These lawns also bear signs every few months warning pets and small children to keep away due to fresh applications.

That's the last thing I want, to succumb to the easy pay-your-cares-away approach. I'll take the partial over the complete sell out. What are the unintended and longterm consequences of such chemical treatments, both in energy costs of production and environmental impact? It's just not talked about in the conventional suburban existence. We see a small link of the chain that amounts to a pleasant convenience--a weed-free lawn--and are allowed to ignore the vast network of cause-and-effects, the befores and afters.

So, "no" on the ChemLawn approach. I decided to go with a three-prong strategy. I spread a single bag of weed-and-feed ("feed" has interesting connotations as a grass fertilizer), sprayed noticeable weed sproutings with a Round-Up type herbicide, and pulled whatever survived.

At this point, in May of Spring #2, there's been little difference from the au natural approach. There have been weeds aplenty this year, maybe even more than in the past. The poison did kill them in some cases, but it also seemed to create a tougher class of weed, a grizzled 'Nam vet of a plant: battle tested, scarred, yet clinging resiliently to life and propagation. You'll get my stalk when you pry my cold dead roots from the ground....

Last week, we had a ChemLawn rep knock on our door. He'd been "in the neighborhood," dousing other lawns, and couldn't help but notice the uneven look of ours (even when relatively weed-free, our grass doesn't have the roided-out color or rubbery look of some in the community...it just looks nondescript). He felt compelled to climb our steps and offer his services. As we chatted he mentioned that our house was beautiful and it would be a shame to mar this beauty "with an ugly lawn," which his "product" could cure. I told him I'd consider his services and then I threw the flyer he left with us into the trash.

My common weeds are, of course, just the precursor species in a sequence that, if left alone, would eventually produce a forest where a lawn had been. After a few years they'd in turn be crowded out by larger flowering grasses, then brambles and scrub trees, which would themselves succumb beneath the shade of oaks and pines. This lawn, just like all of them in suburbia, exists in a perpetual stasis, a weird pseudo-natal zone propped up by enormous energies in the form of systematized fuel and chemistry, and in my case, some small but regular physical exertion.

In the end, the weeds will win. I'm sort of on their side.