Hoping the grass will grow

Over the course of the summer my backyard, most of it, has been transformed from weedy suburban wilderness to yard of hope and promise. (And still some weeds.)

Back in June I paid a local tree service to cut down the weedy mulberry and slippery elm trees and grind out the stumps that could be ground away. The ones that remain, too close to the house or garage for grinding, I'll be poisoning, salting and hacking at for the next five years, if I keep at it. 

This week, landscapers removed the old broken fence, lots of tall weeds and some very dead grass and graded, tilled and generally cleaned up the soil. There are new empty beds along the neighbor's fence and the back boundary of the yard, where someday, when I find a contractor, I will have a new back fence. In the middle there's a large area seeded with new grass. 

The last thing the landscapers did before they left for the day was to hand me a sheet of instructions for watering new grass. It's all up to me now. I am to water the new seed for five to ten minutes morning and evening until the seeds germinate, which could take 5 days, the paper says, or 30. After that there's a lot of watchfulness and judgement as the grass grows, and maybe one mowing before winter comes. 

I've been kind of worried about this part. I can remember to do something night and morning without fail for at most four or five days. Currently I am remembering to take a dose of Paxlovid every morning and evening after a recent positive covid test. This is not hard to remember to do because the stuff works great. Also, the bitter, metallic taste in my mouth, a common side-effect of the drug, is with me constantly. I'm counting the doses until I'm done. 

There are no such sensory cues for remembering to water the grass. The pots of zinnias and petunias on my patio tell me with a look that they need water, and bless them, they manage to recover even when I've let them go until they're drooping and dry. But the grass seed just lies there. And watering it requires stepping carefully through the mud as I move the sprinkler from the middle of the back yard to the position needed to water the side yard. I have designated a pair of muddy flip-flops for this operation and I have a new $40 sprinkler from Amazon with adjustable nozzles and guides, but no good overall strategy. 

But once it's going, it is nice to sit and watch the water go back and forth. I think about the green that will fill my yard next spring, and the new prairie flowers and grasses I'll plant along the fences. 

There is work to do, weeds to be dealt with in other corners of my property. My overgrown lilac bush needs some thoughtful pruning. And what about that basketball hoop? The torn net hanging from the hoop has been known to attract gold finches and hummingbirds. They hang there briefly before flying off to find real food. Should I hang a bird feeder from the hoop instead?