Waking up to the sun shining, a mockingbird singing and
children playing I said, “Today I’ll commit murder.” Murder… my Turf, that is.
I had to kill my grass to save my soul. Or at least my water
bills and/or sanity, whichever I had more of. (Answer: water bills.) My first
step was finding a murder plan, so I grabbed an Agatha Christie mystery and
began reading. With all the dozens of murders Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and
Luke Fitzwilliam had solved, none of them detailed killing grass. I needed to
speak to a professional turf murderer.
“Harold, I need help,” I said waving to my 86 year-old
neighbor as he stood in his front yard. He swatted the air with a flick of his
wrist while watching the lawn sprinklers douse the barren dirt patch in front
of his house. His yard was so defunct it looked like a bomb had been dropped on
it eighty-four times. “Wow,” I said with admiration. “Your lawn is super dead.”
“I didn’t kill it intentionally.”
“But when you don’t set out to kill something, you
really kill it.”
“Since I washed my car, nothing will grow here,” he said kicking the dirt.
If I killed my lawn the
same way he’d killed his, I wouldn’t be able to grow so much as a weed ever
again. I took one step back, then another.
“You want my help killing your grass?” he asked.
“I can’t hear you—” I said sprinting to my front door and
slamming it behind me.
Inside I raced to the internet. I found sites full of
information on killing the lawn with a silver bullet. The method was so quick
it took just 24 hours. What a difference one day could make! I read on—the
silver bullet used chemicals. But then… weren’t these quick chemical options
just like Harold’s murder method of car washing? This wasn’t a
rhetorical question. It was the truth. And I answered it truthfully: Moving on!
I opened a new search window and googled “organic methods +
killing grass”. Apparently vinegar was a popular method embraced by fellow turf
killers but it entailed buying whole glasses, bottles and vats of vinegar to
kill the grass. Full Disclosure: yes, I wanted to murder my grass but if I were
going to buy vats of anything it would be water, whiskey or wine.
Moving on!
I sought out wholesome organic methods of “taking care of
the grass”, which is an Italian mob euphemism for “whacking the turf” and found
one called “Lasagna”. This method's recipe had my mouth watering: Lay six (6) layers of cardboard
and/or newspapers on the grass then atop that, pile six (6) inches of organic
mulch. Let it cook in the sun for two (2) months then with a shovel dig through
the mulch and paper mess and plant your drought tolerant plants directly in the
muck. Serves 1 hernia to the idiot doing this by herself.
Several things bothered me about this: 1) Where would I get
enough cardboard to create six layers (?!) to cover my whole yard? 2) Who would
do the back-breaking work of piling on the six inches of mulch to cover the
entire lawn? (Answer: moi). And 3) A
cooking time of two months?! Yes, I was lacking sanity but I wasn’t crazy! Moving
on!
Approaching my wit’s end, which actually was a short journey
considering how few wits I possessed to have even embarked on this Quixotic
murder endeavor in the first place, I found a last option: Plastic. This method
entailed mowing the grass short, covering the lawn in large sheets of black
plastic and pinning the plastic sheet down with bricks, boards or the lawn
mower since I wouldn’t be needing that thing ever again. Denied sunlight by
the opaque black plastic for six weeks, the grass would wither and die.
Ahhh, yes. Murdering with plastic, how shrewd, inexpensive and effortless. Or as Agatha
Christie said Murder is Easy. And the Queen of Murder would know.
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