Lawn doesn’t taste too good

When I was about 7 years old I tried planting radishes on the grassy hill in our backyard. I tugged away at the thick mats of grass with my fingers and poked and scratched my thumbs into the hard dirt in an attempt to make some holes for the seeds. I covered the seeds with the hard ground and torn grass and hoped. I brought out a glass of water and gave a little dousing. Just like I learned in fucking preschool – soil, water, sunlight. Shoulda worked according to that model. Needless to say the turfy land didn’t yield a bounty of radishes. Nothing germinated. Elementary school didn’t really emphasize the whole point about a nourishing soil.

Land is a sort of tricky thing these days. The closest I have ever been to “having a land of my fathers” was the one acre of land around my house. Which was a lawn. Hello, suburbs, what the fuck else do you plant except for grass and very ugly hedging. Maybe a few begonias (though we didn’t) and daffodils (those we did). No one in my house ate lawn. No one was excited about lawn. It was just mowed. Seeded once or twice. My family used almost an acre of land to grow something that was completely useless (I don’t see ruminant stomachs anywhere in the human evolutionary future) and required weekly maintenance from a very loud machine that often broke (we went through 4 shitty mowers in 10 years). And everyone in our neighborhood did this. Actually, our neighbors were more crazed about their lawns than we were. They had riding mowers (yup, drove around on that 1 acre. Back and forth. Back and forth). The really crazy ones mowed in patterns so it looked like a checker board. They re-sodded and sprayed. They were very concerned with brown spots. They turned on their sprinklers nightly. They yelled at you if you walked on that precious green (walking on grassy land, apparently a HUGE problem for some grassy landowners). Clearly this all took tons of time, resources, labor, money, and stress. And for what? What can you do with a lawn? Lawns are a monoculture as opposed to a naturalized landscape that features dozens of plants that serve various purposes to animals and insects as food and shelter. A lawn is often made up of grasses not native to the region; therefore it requires tons of water, pesticides, and herbicides to become established. A gasoline powered machine is needed to maintain it (unless you have some goats or other ruminants around). Grass is often not compatible with other plants and trees and it depletes the soil over time. It is estimated that grass takes up 32 million acres of the United States making it the largest irrigated crop by area in the nation. That’s a fuck load of grass. Why do we grow so much of something that isn’t even delicious? I don’t care how much Walt Whitman you read, who the fuck wants a damn lawn?

While living in these turfy suburbs I never ate anything from this land. I didn’t do anything to nourish it. I didn’t cultivate (except for the radish thing). I did have a somewhat fiery, childish bout of weeding the unkempt flower beds begun by the previous owner of the land (my parents never touched these flower beds). You can imagine what I ate (it included a fucking ton of chicken and white sauce from a jar…did you eat this shit? For some reason it figures highly in my remembrances of family dinners). Food came from the oddly bright and maniacally organized aisles of the area location of a chain grocery store – lots of shit in packages that was processed, stored, and shipped. There isn’t too much of a food culture or way of life that can evolve from a thin plastic grocery bag or ugly, squared off hedging. I grew up without a sense of place or grounding. I grew up without roots. I grew up knowing how to mow the fucking lawn.