Corona Diary: I want to be a lawn

It’s the Easter Bank Holiday so, naturally, my thoughts have turned to gardening. Today I was out there with my lawn rake and my secateurs looking every inch a complete Titchmarsh.
It’s a shame I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.
I mean, I try doing simple things like mowing the lawn or weeding but the plants all look the same to me. I’m sat there, on my hands and knees, trowel in hand, trying to remove all the plants that shouldn’t be there, but one green leafy thing looks very much like another, and I spend most of my time trying timing to work out if I’m digging up a dandelion or unearthing a trailing lobelia.
My current focus is sorting out the lawn. For a start, I figure I can recognise grass. As with all things in life, if in doubt I resort to the internet. Naturally, this means everything takes five times as long as I get distracted watching 15 videos on exactly what kind of moss killer to use, and how to
change the height on my lawnmower.
It also means a simple search on how frequently to cut the grass has led to a massive project after I got redirected to thousands of videos of Americans with perfectly flat, golf course style lawns.
I don’t have a perfectly flat lawn. I have the result of years of neglect, ant-hills and subsidence. If you were to play golf on it, it would have to involve a windmill and trying to get the ball in the clown’s mouth.
Nonetheless, I decided to give it a go. Having spent twenty minutes watching a man spreading sand slowly and methodically over his lawn, I was both riveted and fully informed as to what I needed to get started. I needed some sand. That’s alright, I thought, I’ve got some leftover sand from the children’s play pit. I went to the garage, picked up my half bag of sand, and went back to the internet to see how much I was going to need.
Half a ton. Apparently, to appropriately top-dress my back garden would require half a ton of sand. That’s not a back garden, that’s the Sahara. I’ve seen beaches with less sand than that.
I trust what I read though, so I went back to the internet to research grass seed, figuring that, once it’d had half a ton of sand dumped on top of it, the lawn might need a little help to recover.
Have you seen the number of different types of grass seed you can get? I’d foolishly assumed I’d just pick the big pack labelled lawn grass and then head over to payment and delivery. Oh, how foolish. Turns out I need to answer a questionnaire before I’m allowed anywhere near the checkout. It asked me really searching questions such as ‘is your lawn shady’. Well, it depends. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In the middle of the day, it gets quite a lot of sun. In the middle of the night on the other hand…
I skipped that question, and headed on to ‘what do you tend to use your lawn for’. This stumped me, if only because I couldn’t think of any other answers than ‘to stop my garden looking muddy’. Eventually, I realised that the answers they were looking for were either ‘ornamental’ or ‘general purpose’. If you’ve seen my garden, you’ll realise its anything but ornamental. So, easy win there I feel.
Eventually, though, I abandoned the questionnaire because one of the side items caught my eye. Self-repairing lawn grass. Now, this seemed right up my street. If there’s any kind of plant I like, it’s the kind that does its own gardening. I even managed to find the active ingredient. Zurich creeping ryegrass. Apparently, this miracle grass easily spreads to surrounding areas to fill in bare patches, of which I have many. Admittedly, the largest bare patches are the flower beds, and anything that spreads without any assistance starts to sound less like a friendly lawn grass and more like a weed with good PR.
I ordered it anyway. I may have just swapped all the time I normally on lawn maintenance for time spent doing the weeding. But, this time, I’ll definitely recognise which one is the weed.