I am not great when it comes to yard care. We don't have the worst yard in the neighborhood. But it's a long way from being anything like the best. I really enjoy seeing well kept yards. But apparently not enough to actually turn my yard into such a place.

For me, beautiful yards are a lot like Christmas lights on houses. I love seeing festive holiday lighting on houses. But not enough to actually put Christmas lights on my own house.

When the kids were younger they always clamored for our family to hang exterior holiday lights. I would always tell them that they couldn't see the lights on their own house from inside the house, so that if they liked Christmas lights, the best thing they could do was to look out the window at the neighbors' houses.

This didn't stop the kids from grousing about wanting to put up lights. Until they got older, that is. Eventually they got to the age where they realized that they would be the ones doing the work of setting up and taking down the lights. Then they became quite content to continue my non-lighting policy.

When our yard was still taking shape a quarter century ago, I came home from work one day to find about a dozen trees in the driveway. My wife informed me that her sister and brother-in-law were coming over for dinner, and that after dinner my brother-in-law and I would be planting those trees.

Over the years my yard care techniques have succeeded in the demise of all but two of those trees. The two remaining — a silver maple in the front yard and a blue spruce in the back yard that I planed too close to the property line — must have been of hardier stock. They have gotten quite large, despite my efforts.

Several ornamental features have been added to our yard over time. This would have been fine, except that my wife isn't much for yard care either. This means that these features have more of a natural unkempt appearance rather than anything akin to orderly beauty.

The lawn is a mess. Although we prepared the yard and carefully planted a premium seed blend all those years ago, the lawn is now filled with a variety of less wanted grasses and weeds. Moreover, it's bumpy enough to make lawn mowing a jarring experience.

The bumps resulted from trying to care for the lawn without adequate training. We had the lawn aerated each year, but this only seemed to produce a yard full of mud plugs that looked an awful lot like dog poop. When these plugs melded back into the turf they became bumps.

One day I asked a friend who has a gorgeous lawn — an avid golfer who tells me that he loves yard care almost as much as he enjoys golfing — how often he aerates beautiful his lawn. He shrugged his shoulders and replied, "Never." Gaaa! All those years of trying to do the right thing had only ended up making our lawn worse.

Despite my wife's protestations, I haven't put fertilizer on the lawn for years. Mainly because I don't want to mow more than every seven days. Every time I have fertilized in the past, the lawn has grown enough to require mowing every five days. And in my estimation, it hasn't really looked any better.

I actually do have some treatments that I know to be effective. Broad leaf killer does kill dandelions and clover. The trouble is getting around to applying the stuff. It's really not that onerous of a task. But frankly, any kind of yard work seems onerous to me. So killing weeds ends up fairly low on the priority list.

Besides, since getting a dog I have been loath to put chemicals on the lawn lest the animal be harmed by tromping around in the residue. Even if said dog has made the yard worse by digging holes, leaving droppings, and making trails.

But I have been concerned about the bountiful dandelion crop that has been popping up since spring's early arrival this year. So I finally picked up some broad leaf killer at the hardware store. As is my nature, I put off spraying the stuff while it was warm outside. I apparently had to wait until last night when temperatures had dropped more than 20 degrees from the previous day.

When I left for work this morning I noted with satisfaction that some of the dandelions already look very sickly from last night's chemical application. It looks like I got the jump on the weeds this time around.

But I know that this is just the first skirmish of the season. The weeds will be back. Maybe I will actually garner sufficient motivation to re-treat the lawn in a couple of months before it gets too bad. The realistic side of me says that I will probably procrastinate until the yard looks more like a field of yellow flowers than a lawn.

This is my perpetual conundrum. I like having a yard. I would really like to have a nice yard. But I don't like doing yard care. And I am apparently too cheap to hire professionals to manage it for me.
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