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| You call this a weed? I call it a violet - pretty and edible. |
If there’s one thing I will never understand it is America’s
predilection for grass. Not the smoke-able for pleasure kind, the chemically-treated,
filler-of-acres-of-potentially-useful-space kind. The kind of grass that grows
in prairies is beautiful. It’s green all summer. It’s fettered with a mixture
of other plants – things people might call “weeds”, and grazing animals would
probably call “food”, and the terrain would call “ground cover” or something to
keep the land from eroding. Thankfully, the land that is not someone’s backyard
seems to be free from mortal terror. If it is attached to a plot with a house,
however, all bets for sane behavior are off.
Of course,
we’ve already discussed that someone will probably come out with a gas-powered
vacuum or blower to aerate the rodent feces and spew them all over the yard.
When they are done with that, the next plan of action is to seed the lawn with
a grass seed that is not native to the area. Rather than allowing Mother Nature
to do what she does best, grow ecosystems, people think they can do better.
They plant “better” grass. What makes one grass better than another? Sharper
blades? A bluer hue of green? Is it less prickly when your trophy wife sits on
it in her Daisy Dukes? Does it cut more easily (not that that matters much
since it will most likely be sheared with a power mower that can shred human
flesh)? And THEN since we need to optimize the land for the premium grass, we
MUST KILL EVERYTHING ELSE. This means that any grass that is actually native or
that will grow in the ground even when there isn’t enough water has to die. We should
murder the violets. Dandelions have to go. And just to be sure, anything that flowers
or has leaves, not blades, will have to go.
It would be
one thing if the tender of this lawn painstakingly pulled each unwanted plant
by hand, removing dandelions by the root, pulling every weed as you would out
of a garden. While I would still find this to be odd behavior, I could at least
appreciate the effort. I weed my
flowerpots. I have weeded gardens. It is a labor of love, and it is done to
support the plants you are trying to foster. Most grass growers, however, give
their grass the edge with some sort of chemical weapon. It’s always a weed
killer they spread all over their plot of land to choke the life out of the
beautiful green plants that have popped up in the places where the grass won’t
grow. Monsanto and Dow, two of my favorite companies, are suppliers of such
things.
This space
could have been used for a garden. This space could have been used to let
nature grow the plants it knows can grow. Instead, this space is being forced
to try and grow non-native grass. If you live anywhere near where I do, the
summer water bans are already in effect, so you may only water your lawn on
even numbered days. It’s not raining very much. The grass seed you’ve put out,
which hasn’t been eaten by the birds, is not growing so well. And you have now
killed what was actually growing in your lawn. Without enough water, and with
the approaching heat and sun of summer, it will only be a few weeks now before
the beautiful cancer carpet you think you are growing turns completely brown.
And then I’m left wondering, what on earth was the point of all that?!
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