Monday, June 4, 2012

Mantain* (for Maintain*)

Are you the kind of person who grows tired of (or guilty about) watering your lawn? Who gets crabby at the sight of crabgrass, and weary of pulling weeds? In short, do you long for a lawn that's easy to maintain? You might want to try a novel solution called Eco-Lawn, a proprietary blend of seven fescue grasses, advertised as "the ultimate low maintenance drought tolerant lawn." Please note that I'm not getting paid to shill for this Canadian company; in fact, I'm paying rather dearly for the product itself. But it looks as though it really might be worth a shot. Especially if the idea of finely bladed, thickly matted, floppy sort of grass that basically never needs to be mowed, like a well-behaved meadow in your backyard, appeals to you. Apparently, you can either start with a bare (perhaps rototilled) patch of ground (the best way if possible) or else you can "overseed" your existing lawn for several years in a row, until the new tenant takes over and drives out your current residents. There were 12 cases of Mantain* sprouting up in OhioLINK, and a more alarming array of 330 in WorldCat. Start the weeding process now and you won't have to pull so many of these out later on.

(Meadow fescue, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

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