Watching Grass Grow

In preparation for the much anticipated Petunia, I began researching grass seed and growing shortly after moving in to my new half-of-a-house.  It is, after all, the perfect season for planting grass.  I live on the first floor of this cute little house in Mount Adams.  I should say at this point that I am still optimistic that when the snow melts in the spring, my recently planted grass will spring to life, be dog-ready and the house will be mud-free!

HTGV and a few other blogs made this task out to look pretty simple.  Okay, I thought.  Surely, I can be garden-handy (well, maybe, I have never really kept a single plant alive - I even caused the death of a Christmas cactus).  So, I headed to Lowe's and filled my cart with one of those metal long hoe-like things, a bag of grass seed (thanks to the non-friendly, non-helpful worker), and gloves.  Simple enough, right?  I wasn't quite sure that it could really be this easy, so after a phone call to a super handy landscaping genius-friend, I made one more stop on the way home to pick up some peat moss (type of organic compound) to cover the seed after the spreading.  I realize at this point that this must not sound very promising, but keep reading, there is a happy ending, I promise!

After a few short hours of hard work, I had the leaves raked, dirt dug up, grass seed and peat moss thrown across the area and water was sprinkling across the potential new yard.  I wish I had taken pictures of this for documentation!  Or maybe just to show where I started. There was nothing but dirt, sticks and a few scattered plants back there.  But, let me also not kid you about the work load - this is a pretty small area (good thing)!

I kept up with daily watering and after about a week, I had little sprouts of grass only visible when I put my nose 3 inches from the ground.  I was so excited and truly proud of my work.  I don't know why I didn't think it would really work.

All in all, watching grass grow has been really exciting (I'm serious!), but there have been some challenges.  Don't you worry, I am going to share them with you now.

Challenge #1 - sprinklers.  Finding a good sprinkler at the end of summer was difficult, and finding one for a little yard was also proved to be harder that I would have thought.  After trying out 5-6 different ones, I finally settled on one of the old fashioned back and forth, little area covering kinds.  The others were shooting clear across the neighbors' yards and through my screen door into the kitchen!

Challenge #2 - how much seed are you supposed to spread?  I headed back to the store about 3 weeks later, Home Depot this time, for more grass seed, as my yard was looking just a little too sparse.  I didn't want to not have enough grass in the spring, and then it would be the wrong time of year!!  So, I got more grass seed and top filler of some kind (that looked like cat litter).  

Challenge #3 - fall leaves.  After planting all of this seed and spending a significant of time looking at my grass grow, next I naturally got a little worried when the leaves kept falling off of the giant tree.  Were the leaves going to die and suffocate my little seeds and baby grass?  Or would raking the leaves also rake up and disturb my germinating seeds (is that what they do? I'm not really sure)?  After taking a few deep breaths, I decided to rake the leaves and everything turned out just fine.  Feeww!

Now, after about 2 months, this is what my beautiful back yard looks like (below).  I am so excited, and my yard is too, it looks happy!  Now we are ready and waiting for that little Petunia!