NALM and changing times

By Bobby Neal Winters

We come to April and the season for mowing has begun.

Well, it has kind’ve/sort’ve begun.  The sun is up higher in the sky. It’s getting warmer. Saint Patrick’s Day has past; Spring has arrived; we’ve celebrated Easter; but the season just hasn’t hit its stride yet.

According to the ancient fonts of wisdom, this is because we’ve had a dry winter.

And that is true.  While we’ve had some rain recently, I’m told that if you dig down beyond the surface the ground is dry.

As of this writing, I’ve only mowed once and only part of my holding.  I’ve done the perimeter of the backyard.  For some reason, the “grass” around the perimeter of the backyard grows more quickly than the rest of the lawn. I’ve put quotes around the “grass” in that last sentence because it’s not grass strictly speaking.

My lawn in an amalgam of plants native to this region of the world.  They are survivors of the plains and prairie.  These plants are what remains after multiple attempts at murder by a brutal climate.

The plants around the edge of my lawn have learned that if you don’t get in your licks early in this part of the world, you might as well forget it.  Summer’s gonna kill you.

And I mow them down.

It just doesn’t seem right, does it?  But it is the way.  Maybe, by dent of evolution, they will eventually learn to duck.

By the summer, it will eventually settle down and look like a normal lawn, but my days of a peaceful membership in NALM (the National Association of Lawn Mowers) may be in jeopardy.

There is new leadership in NALM.  Previously, there had been tolerance for a lawn like mine. In the far past, it was a cheerful tolerance.  There was a memory that at one time all lawns were like mine: mown weeds.

But we’ve got a new breed of leadership coming into NALM. They’ve got their studies, their models, their ideas of the way a lawn is supposed to be. Their ideas come from the theorists, theorists who’ve gazed at their own navels for incomprehensible periods of time, thinking about the “Ideal Lawn.”

They believe a lawn can be more than what it has been.  We simply have to organize it in the right way.  Letting it proceed organically just isn’t good enough. There has to be design; there has to be a plan; mowing your weeds just ain’t gonna cut it.

So to speak.

There have been fads coming through before. Ambitious leaders with agendas have come in before.  Leaders promoting edging; leaders promoting pavers; leaders promoting watering, plugging, reseeding.

In response, we’ve edged for a while; we put in a few pavers; we watered a while and reseeded. (They never got us to plug.) But after a while, they’d put some items on their CVs and went away, and we proceeded in our own organic way: keeping what worked, and forgetting the rest.

We’ve worked with the grass God has given us, and we’ve made it look better than anybody ever thought it could.

This feels different.  Something might have to give this time.

While a higher percentage of NALM members are keeping up the NALM standards, there have been a stream of members opting to leave. Most people who mow their lawns today don't belong to NALM. It’s just too much of a headache. They do as they please. They don’t choose to benefit from the advice that NALM has to offer.

The lawn world is becoming like Israel during the days of the Judges, everyone does what is good in his own eyes.

There is benefit to your lawn from being accountable to others, to interacting with peers and gaining insights from them.

Therefore, I continue with membership in NALM even though the winds seem to be changing, even though I am old and NALM seems to be going in a direction away from me.

My lawn is not what it could be, but it is my lawn. I will look at the suggestions NALM sends my way, and I will make the best use of them I can. But my lawn is what it is. Henbit and dandelions need a home too.

And we could use some more rain.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.