Yesterday we attended to the lawn problems. At the front of the house we have a fine, lush, healthy lawn, and although it may have the odd weed here and there it is essentially a lawn, an area of grass that you can walk on barefoot in the summer (and in the winter if you’re hardy enough) and enjoy.

What we have out the back is a different kettle of fish. We have two ‘lawns’. They are not comprised of edge to edge uninterrupted grass they are simply areas of the garden that are designated as ‘lawns’. The Upper Lawn, a plot of roughly 20’ by 16’ has about a square foot of grass. In fact yesterday it had more oak trees than blades of grass in it. I re-located two or three dozen of the oak trees into pots – if they want to grow they can do it on my terms – and then scraped away the celandine to reveal….mostly bare earth. It is a difficult site to manage because of the persistent badger problem, shade from the huge oak above it, and the fact that is at the end of a long garden. I seeded it again anyway – I don’t give up that easy - I want my patch of grass and I want it on the only bit of flat ground I’ve got.

As for the Lower Lawn…..well it’s a small nightmare, an ongoing battle with badgers and foxes means the lunar surface it has become is a broken ankle waiting to happen. Per square foot of ‘lawn’ there are at least two or three pits about the size of a paw. And in an area at least 20’ by 30’ that’s a lot of holes. We filled them all in as many as we could find with a mix of topsoil, sand and grass seed but I suspect there are still craters. It should look like an area of green grass with tiny islands of brown but it is more like a blanket of brown with occasional tufts of green wavy stuff.

At least I don’t have to worry about watering it today though, thanks to the rain I can just sit inside and watch the grass grow. Ha ha – I’ll believe it when I see it.

I should be out dancing today but there weren’t enough of us able to go. Quite frankly it is something of a relief as I do have a whole bunch of other stuff to do plus dancing in the rain is enervating without being overly pleasurable.