I'd love to be able to say that we don't have a lawn.... or that we don't mow it.... or that we use the oh-so-green non-power blade mower.

The truth of the matter is that we rent a cottage and we share yard space with our landlord, the owner of the main house. He hires a team of gardeners (a constantly rotating team of short, Hispanic guys, who are generally polite, but refuse to look me in the eye even when I say hello) and once Memorial Day rolls around they come every Friday morning like clockwork to mow with the tractor mower and blow leaves (with the annoyingly loud power blower) out of the yard.

It doesn't take them all that long to do the area around my cottage; maybe 30 minutes.  But every week it annoys me just the same - it just seems so wasteful. It's only the first week in June - our "lawn" definitely does not need mowing every week. When I suggested to my landlord that perhaps every other week would be sufficient, he said you can only hire the guys either once a week or once a month and he thought once a month was too infrequent.  Sigh.

On the bright side, they never water and they don't put any kind of pesticides, weed-killer or seed down.  My yard isn't really what anyone would call "lawn;" the cottage is surrounded by trees, mainly hemlock and poplar, with a few maples and oaks, so it is quite shady. There is definitely grass, but there are at least a dozen other varieties of plants; if I knew anything about botany I could probably identify them.  I know there are wild strawberries in the yard, but you almost never see a berry before a deer, bird, squirrel or chipmunk does.  There are a couple of varieties of moss, and some tiny white & purple flowering plants. At least it is not the typical monoculture "lawn." I've never quite understood the appeal.

As for growing your own, I started my first ever tomato plants from seed this year.  Of course, I started them too late (even though every book & website I looked at said 6 to 7 weeks prior to the first frost date); the biggest of said seedlings is about 3 inches tall right now.  Well, I'm ever hopeful that we'll get a long, warm Fall... there are worse things than fresh tomatoes in October.  As insurance, I bought a much larger tomato plant from a local organic farm - an orange heirloom variety - which has already sprouted it's first tiny tomato fruit.  Whoo hooo!  For the investment of $3.50 for the plant, about $5 worth of 'organic' potting mix, and $4 for an old bushel basket as container, I should have dozens of delicious, heirloom tomatoes in a month or two. Compared to propagating from seed, this was so easy it feels like cheating!
 

  I wait until I get a notice from my mobile home park before I cut my grass.  I'm also one of few on the "No Spray" list.  I fertilize my water with a home-made liquid formula derived from biologically spent nutrients.  You can tell where I "fertilized".  There are spots and lines taller and greener than the rest of the lawn.

My brother lives in NC and has actually gotten on his hands and knees and eaten directly from his garden....

You know, it's the little things...

Not just a funny story, a very funny story. Sounds like something every single one of us should try at least once... hmmm.... I'll check the beans when I get home.