Life With Meadow. (Not a tampon ad)

For those of you who've been riding the roller coaster known as My Front Yard Meadow, you may have noticed that this not an approach for the anal retentive, tidy-minded, control freaks of the world.

Who needs tidy when there's POPPIES.

 Not that I want to scare anyone off of turning their lawns over to create their own personal near-xeric WILD ASS meadow in their yards, but I am still getting used to Life With Meadow and thought I'd drag you all along for the ride today.

 I'm the nicest.

Life With Meadow - sounds like a lame TV show that might be on Lifetime. I assure you, this is not that.

See - there are the upsides to the concept:

• You can get rid of your water sucking lawn and it's water shooting sprinkler system
• You can roll your mower into the street for the garbage truck to play with
• You can go through intensive physical therapy to regain full use of your rotator cuff and then never use the muther effing asshole string trimmer again
• You get to inhale all the oohs and aahs from your neighbors as they admire the many colors of poppies sproinging loose from your yard all over the damn sidewalk
• You get to watch hummingbirds, butterflies, honey and bumble bees, lizards and finches all return to your yard to play, eat, kill one another and fornicate now that it's no longer a wasteland of useless lawn out there
• It's pretty

This is the former pee-hole. I think you will agree that it has improved somewhat.

But then there are also the downsides, which, now after more than a full year's seasonal changes under my belt, I'm just starting to get a handle on:

• In some seasons the yard just looks like shit
• There's some maintenance involved in ripping crap out once it's gone to seed (poppies - I love you but WOW do you get ugly when you're done)
• You find trash that's flown into the yard and gotten stuck and then you have to pick it out and throw it away
• Some neighbors think you're totally a nutter

Now, I can still count and that still looks like more pros than cons for the Front Yard Meadow concept, but I thought I'd be remiss if I didn't bring it all out into the open for you fine people so that no one went wandering off into the sod cutter rental yard thinking that yard dominance was at hand with just a few quick swipes of the yard.

That is not so and I'd be doing you a disservice to lead you to believe that it was, indeed, so.

Instead I will tell you that I'm pretty SUPER glad that we're past the It Looks Like Shit Right Now But Wait Until Spring When It Looks Really Pretty time of year (AKA Fall and Winter) and getting into the Yes It's Beautiful Now So Please Remember This Come Winter When It Looks Like Shit Again time of year (AKA Spring and Summer).

 Another thing about this whole meadow concept is that it's not a one shot deal. You can't just (or, I guess *I* can't just) plant it once and forget about it, leaving it to do its xeric beautifying of the neighborhood without any additional intervention.

No. It needs help.

Help in the sense of pulling shit out that randomly grows (weeds, overturned lawn with a new found lease on life, the nefarious offspring of one slutty Guara...), pruning crap back that gets wildly out of hand (Guara, aforementioned suddenly virile lawn) and planting new stuff in the spots that become bare from the pulling out of shit I don't want.

It's a process, you might say. It's a "labor of love", some might say even though that trite bullshit saying makes me want to jam spoons into my ears and those of the person saying it.

I'm going with - it's a process. And I'm getting used to it. Life With Meadow means I'm not done yet and I probably won't ever be *done* and that's actually OK because I like this messy, weird, unpredictable space way better than the neat, tidy and predictably needs to be mowed every five goddamned minutes in between intensive waterings lawn that lived here before.

So, there's your Front Yard Meadow update. I'll be sure to post some photos after the whip and chair taming action I'm going to lay down on this beast this weekend whilst handing out tomato plants.