The Right Tool for the Job

When I was 20, I never would have believed that I'd be blogging about planting grass in my backyard. One, they didn't have blogs 20 years ago, and two, why would I have believed that I'd have sunk to writing about such mundane topics?

Well, 20-year-old Mark, the backyard needed grass seed, but have no fear: I'm not blogging about it. Rather, this is a write-up about the tools I used. It's a subtle but important difference.

We already seeded the yard twice. First, using 5-year-old grass seed, we put the seed down and watched 4 straight days of driving rain wash it all away. Later, using the same 5-year-old grass seed, we sprinkled it on the areas in need, covered them with straw, and watched absolutely nothing happen. Clearly, the seed was past its usefulness. So I went to the store for more, and the guy recommended breaking up the soil in addition to covering it up with straw. So I raked up the straw and went about breaking up the hard-pack topsoil.

With a shovel -- which made for slow, tedious work. What I really needed, I realized, was an aerator -- one of those spiked rollers that would really break things up with much less effort. For some reason, I poked my head inside our tool shed... and low and behold, hanging on the wall was an aerator (pictured above)!

Where did it come from? I certainly never had one. Could it be that when I married the lovely Alison two and a half years ago I unknowingly married a girl who owned an aerator? However it came to being, it made the job much more pleasant -- and quicker. The soil is broken up, the seed spread, and the hay scattered. And Alison informed me that when her neighbor moved away 5 years ago, her roommate at the time pulled the aerator -- along with our clothes-drying rack -- out of his dumpster.

Really? The neighbor's dumpster? We use the drying rack all the time, but I never knew it came as the result of dumpster-diving. And, as for the aerator, it only took 5 years, but we finally used it too.