Grass and Lawn Care

According to the University of Maryland, “low and infrequent mowing is the major cause of lawn deterioration.” Their suggestions for maintaining a lush green lawn include watering on an “as needed” basis and not letting the grass get longer than three inches before cutting.

If cutting the grass outdoors is too much work, why not keep it as a houseplant? At www.livingroomlawns.com, you can buy a bucket full of dirt and some wheatgrass seeds and keep your lawn indoors. Besides making an attractive plant (they have lots of pictures on their website), you can also apparently grind up the grass and make it into a ‘wonderful and cleansing rejuvenator’ that will supply you with plenty of chlorophyll. This will presumably come in handy when you start photosynthesizing to stave off starvation from trying to live on wheatgrass. (Incidentally, you would need to eat about 1.5 pounds of grass every day to get enough energy to survive).

The fake-grass alternative

For the truly lazy, there’s always Astro-lawn, the new cousin of Astro-turf. Astro-turf was patented in 1967 by Monsanto, the same multi-billion-dollar chemical company responsible for aspartame, Agent Orange, and masses of loud, angry protesters from all over the world.

Recently, the term “astro-turf” has been used to refer to fake grassroots support created by the PR firms of corporations. These firms create letter campaigns and websites to make it seem as though there is legitimate support of their cause. A particularly good example can be found at www.heartland.org, an organization that opposes controls of the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and declares, among other things, that “most [scientists] believe a slight warming and rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) would be beneficial to human progress and wildlife.”

Going potty

The RCMP continues to break yearly records on the amount of pot they seize every year. In 2001, they seized 28,746 kilograms of marijuana in Canada. A report on their website remarks that a lot of, erm, horticulturalists have begun to grow the stuff in their basements—a potential fire hazard. The report notes that “in some Canadian cities, it has become a common occurence for firefighters to stumble across grow operations while combating a blaze caused by faulty wiring.”

— CD