Clover

The one thing that I miss from that other house, the House From Hell, is the lawn. It wasn’t a good lawn, but it was a robust lawn. We never watered it or poisoned it or “stayed off it”. We just mowed it, and it survived on its own somehow. Not being a “lawn person” I appreciated not having to spend a lot of time maintaining the lawn.

However, when we built the new house,  the old lawn was destroyed by the heavy equipment, and the landscaper put in one of those, wimpy, whiny lawns that wants to be watered and poisoned and molly-coddled all the time. When we didn’t water it, it got brown and died. When we didn’t poison it, it let the weeds take over. Last Summer it looked pretty bad.

But wait….. this is a new year, and one of those weeds was white clover. It turns out that clover is as persistent as our old lawn was. The clover has now taken over from the weeds and is very nice. Check this out:

We now have a lush, bucolic meadow of clover flowers in the yard. We have found out that the clover is better than grass. It doesn’t need to be watered because it shades its own roots. It doesn’t need to be fertilized because it takes nitrogen out of the air and puts it in the roots. It doesn’t need to be poisoned because it takes over from the other “weeds”. It even helps the grass that is mixed in because the grass benefits from all those things as well.

We got our robust lawn back in a year. All we have to do is mow it. Go figure.

And best of all, we have these guys:

Lots of them. Check out the nectar in his saddle bags! Somewhere there is a stash of clover honey being built.

Interested? There is more information on the web:

Establishing A White Clover Lawn