Better Yards Through Chemistry

Rainy and overcast. Been that way since Saturday. The ground is soggy, the sort of condition that’s mentioned in retrospect. “Before the northwest suburban flood of 2006, it had rained for days, and the ground was so saturated that it couldn’t hold any more water. Before the great storm broke, no one knew the soggy sod and grass were harbingers of disaster.” Imagine it narrated by David McCullough, though he usually sticks to big-picture stories.

I noticed that wet grass doesn’t keep the TruGreen ChemLawn trucks from delivering their greenifying chemicals to neighborhood yards. A house on the other side of the street is for sale—has been for a couple of months now, so it seems that the buyers’ market is for real around here—and they had TruGreen treatments today. The truck pulls up, a guy with a sprayer gets out, he sprays, and then he posts a keep-the-dogs-off-till-dry sign.

I know just a little about chemical runoffs, so my thoughts are dangerous. Is ever so little of today’s treatment going to go to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi? Or does it break down in place? Is the real danger not even to dogs or Gulf shrimp, but to the employee who sprays for two or three decades? Or will his death from an uncontrolled lump demonstrate correlation, not causation?

There’s no way for me to know. Even if I spend time I don’t have studying the matter, I wouldn’t find out for sure. I have my suspicions, though, but even they aren’t the deciding factor in not having my lawn chemically treated.

I look out my window and see that my lawn, recipient of much rain lately, is very green. Green as everyone else’s; green as it needs to be. As winter comes, it will turn brown, and then will be green again as spring returns. Maybe I’m at risk for some kind of bug that will eat all my grass roots, but I’ve lived with lawns for years and never had that problem. So I have better things to do with my money than give some to TruGreen.