“What do we have going on?”
“Not much, today we don’t have anything planned until 5pm or so.”
These phrases are rare; not having much to do for a Saturday is about as common as a Dodo bird around here. The weather was perfect, getting a bit cooler, which meant, it was time for the hardest part of my glorious plans to have a green, green lawn for 2025: time to aerate. And this yard has a lot of room for improvement:
To this point, I had already geeked out quite a bit about it. Taylor can tell you, love it or hate it, I tend to obsess over things, and this was another excellent example. I don’t want to just throw some grass seed out there and see what’s gonna happen; this is something I have never done before, so I dug deep into the subject by reading the Turf Files from the NC State website.
The site describes how the state of North Carolina offers free soil testing during the off season, so of course I took advantage of my tax-payer dollars for this very in demand service:
THe analysis makes a recommendation of the type of soil to use based on the N-P-K proportions. In my case, they recommended just the K (potassium). If you want to do the same, here is the link to test your soil.
The Turf-files also go deep into the various types of grass in North Carolina. For a noob such as myself, this was all news: what kind of grass to go with? I always assumed all grass was the same? It is not all the same. In the Piedmont, you can go with some types of warm-climate grasses, or cool season grasses. The NC State Turf Files recommends doing a blend of grass seed, and Kentucy 31 and Tall Fescue seemed like the perfect mix:
After aerating on Saturday with a 300 pound machine (the Home Depot website says 255 pounds, but surely that number isn’t accurate), Sunday was a chance to do the final, fun stuff of the yard: do a couple passes with the potassium rich fertilizer, as recommended from my soil report; Then, since they didn’t have the recommended seed blend, I took the liberty of mixing my own blend of tall fescue and Kentucy 31 bluegrass:
A couple of passes of the seed, and at this point, in my amateur confidence with no one around to tell me otherwise, I was doing a great job!
But, not through with it yet: the final part, and most people argue as the most important, you gotta keep that stuff WET. And, since I over engineer everything (See last weeks post about the ring workout setup as an example), I had to do the same here and automate the watering.
This is a whole ecosystem of gardening specialty tools. How much, or how little do you want to spend in order to keep your precious turf wet? For me, the answer was very little. And no thank you, please do not connect my watering system to my internet: I do not need to water my lawn while I am away from the house. Amazon, give me the cheap garden-hose automation tool that can help do a better job of watering the lawn than I ever will; and since no sprinkler can hit the whole lawn with the low-water pressure issue we have in our old house, better make 2 timers, and 2 sprinklers in the front yard:
As of the writing of this post, the first watering is underway! We are off to the races, and lord willing, I’m finally gonna be living where the green grass grows in 8-12 weeks! Please, please don’t jump to 90 degrees in the next few weeks!
Festival
Years ago (maybe 8 or 9?), Greensboro became host to the National Folk Festival. Downtown transformed into an awesome, 10 stage music venue with all the fun things, and porta-potties needed to support such an event. Some time after that, the National part of the festival moved on, and was seamlessly replaced by the North Carolina folk festival. Still, many stages and music over three days in downtown greensboro.
We had poor memories from last year’s festival where the music we heard just wasn’t that good. This year, on Friday night, we met up with our neighbors the McCrackens (our Disney Planner) and Rosie got to spend a lot of the night with some of her besties.
This was probably the highlight of the night: Getting to see Elias Alexander, an EDM, Celtic musician (did I get that right?). EDM=”Electronic Dance Music”. What does that mean? It means bagpipes and a Celtic flute with the intense beat of techno. Sounds wild, and it is wild, and it was surprisingly fun:
This music was so good that it made a man who was wheelchair bound get up and do a jig. This fella pushed his way, with his walker, through the crowd so he could get to the front row and show us how it’s done. How can this not tickle your soul with joy?
Finally, at the end of the night on Saturday, I was able to stay up late enough to go to the 11pm after party at The Flat Iron. My friend Hence went the year before and said it was awesome. Though I could only make it to see 45 minutes of the show, it was awesome and gave me Nashville vibes for this small venue in Greensboro. Totally worth the $15 admission to hear Sam Fribush and Friends do their Organ music jam:
Also, I haven’t been out that late in a while, but you get to see some things at that hour you wouldn’t see normally. Our group spent about an hour sitting behind this fella, who was a couple heartbeats away from his night ending poorly, but everyone who walked past did smile pretty big at the sight:
Foul Ball
Ok, I am running out of time before the kids wake up, but, we went to the final baseball game of the season with some good friends and it was fun. Sorry Andy and Laura, you left before I was able to get a pic, but it was fun hanging with your crowd as well:
