If at First You Don't Succeed Spend, Spend Again OR A Sucker's Work is Never Done OR "Then I'll Do It Myself", Said the Little Red Hen. And She Did

All three of the above misquotes were said by me or Ana this weekend as we again spent way too much time on the lawn, sweating and sun-burned as the weather took a turn for the "holy-cow-is-it-hot-or-what?". (Okay it was me. Ana did all the heavy work and my contribution was mostly in the form of grumpy comments. Too bad no quotes from Princess Bride were applicable. Always disappointing when we can't work one in.)

Our (ir)regular gardener flaked out and, even though he did great work, he was just too iffy in reliability and other areas anyway. So we paid some other guy to fertilize and seed the lawn.

Here's where the "sucker" part comes in. The fertilizer was too mulchy and was smothering the grass so we've spent hours raking it off our brownish lawn. Of course, the guy does not return phone calls. So this weekend we also re-seeded. I can't believe how much we've babied this grass for it too look so shabby. We've now thrown enough "green" at it that it's got a lot of nerve to be so tan and crunchy (okay, there's the "spend" part). We have now vowed to never hire anybody again to do anything in the yard. (I'm sure you caught that...it's the hen part).

We also got the materials needed to build our garden in the back replacing more pointless grass. The guy at the home fix-it store complained that we gave him a work out cutting all those boards. They are kind of heavy. I've been schlepping them around the yard for a few days now. I have more than half of the beds built and we all are eagerly looking forward to growing our own food with the help of the square-foot gardener and our buddy from South Carolina who Amazoned the book to us. (Thanks, E!)

I promise, no more snivelling about the lawn and I will seriously look into cutting back on use of parentheses in future posts.