How To Take Care of Your Backyard (with no experience)
A Beginner's Guide to Not Killing Your Lawn
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I looked out at my small/tiny OC backyard and opened Google on my phone. I typed in: "How to revive dead grass," and frowned. My lawn was slowly being taken over by mother nature with knee height grass, weeds, and randomly dead patches of grass in some places, and overgrowth of grass into soil in other places. I had recently fired my gardener because I was paying 90 bucks a month for them to come in for 5 minutes or so every 2 weeks. How hard could it be to mow the lawn, pull weeds and trim the hedges? I found out it was much harder than I imagined, but not so much that I couldn’t build character by doing it.
If you are thinking of doing something similar, read on as I share my experience with learning how to take care of my very small back yard.
Step 1: Get to Know Your Backyard
Assessment is always a good place to start with a project. What exactly was I dealing with? My backyard is only about 12’ x 12’, mostly grass, some hedges, a small evergreen tree and some rose bushes. After doing some light googling, I made a list of things that I needed to accomplish: cut the grass, edge it, trim the hedges/rose bushes, blow the debris away. These were the priorities. I added non priority tasks (which, hey, I have not yet gotten to): ripping out old dead grass, tilling that soil and reseeding with fertilizer, and mulching/carboarding the overgrowth and weeds popping up in the dirt.
I went with Craftsman lawn tools
Step 2: Gather Your Tools
I just needed the basics: a lawn mower, some clippers to trim the hedges and a leaf blower. I eventually settled on a Craftsman corded lawn mower with a matching air blower and edger/trimmer. If you have a small backyard, a corded mower will work fine, however I do ultimately wish I had gotten a battery powered one instead, as I have run over and shredded a power cord quite dramatically. I picked up a simple hedge trimmer as well as weed puller that’ll save my back.
Step 3: Set a Sprinkler Schedule
Plants need water to survive, apparently. I programmed my sprinklers to go off for 5 minutes at 5AM 3 days a week. I move it up to 4 days a week during summer. That seems to work fine in the OC climate.
Step 4: Create a Weekly/Monthly Schedule for Lawn Maintenance
If you are dead set on maintaining your own backyard/lawn, then you’ll need to block off an hour or two at least every other week to keep it looking somewhat tidy/manageable. Of course as your lawn size/ plants grow, you’ll need even more time. Currently, I dedicate a Sunday morning (before church) to mow my lawn, trim my hedges and do any other maintenance that I need to do.
Step 5: Do the Work
Honestly the hardest part! I like to tell myself it builds character. I tell myself its manly. I like to do it with my shirt off so I can fix my farmer’s tan. I listen to a podcast or tunes as I work. Do what you need to do to motivate yourself. Trust me, I know it is hard. But just do it if you’ve said you’re gonna do it. This is a typical session:
Set the tunes.
Mow the Lawn. I go from left to right, down to up to hit the majority of the lawn, then I hit the small awkward nooks and crannies. I dump the trimmings into my green bin.
Edge the Lawn. Using the electric edger, I’ll try and make neat straight cuts at the edges of the lawn. If there are any blades of grass I’ve missed, I’ll trim them at this time too.
Trim the Hedges. Honestly I just eye ball it and try my best to straighten/round everything out. I also trim the rose bush for the dead buds and flowers.
Leaf Blower. I’ll do a sweeping pattern from left to right of my lawn and either blow them out my side door (to let HOA take care of it) or into a pile which i sweep into my green grass bin.
Step 6: Keep Going and Enjoy the Fruits of Your Endeavor
Keeping the lawn nice and tidy is not something that you can do once or twice a year…it needs to be at least twice a month to keep in any sort of good shape, most likely more. Being consistent is going to be the hardest thing about keeping up with your lawn, but trust me, it is much easier to maintain a fine lawn than to fix it after letting it get out of control. Happy mowing!