I need someone to do a bit of mansplaining for me. I need him – or her; never let it be said women can’t mansplain in these enlightened times – to help me get rid of my latest mortal enemy.
No, it’s not the Masterton District Council, though I do look forward to voting for exactly none of its incumbents in the October election. That will show them, I keep thinking. Though, of course, it won’t. As with cockroaches, even if you succeed in stamping out one lot of out-of-touch elected officials who’ve put up our rates by an average 15% each year, another mob of the highway robbers will simply appear to replace them.
So no, not the Masterton council. My new bête noire is something equally irksome and just as difficult to get rid of: moss.
Like most members of the Society for Enthusiastic Ride-on Mower Owners, I have somewhat reluctantly left my lawns alone over these long, frigid winter months.
Indeed, this year, I let them be for even longer than usual in the hope that if I give the Lush Places’ grass a chance to grow and be more lush than usual over winter, it might do it some good. My hope was the grass would start pushing out the weeds instead of the other way around, thus delivering a much more traditional lawn come spring without having to resort to nasty chemicals.
This, like so much in my life, has proved to be something of a blunder. It turned out that as I sat inside by the fire watching the grass slowly grow longer and apparently more lush with every passing week a silent enemy was growing, too.
It was only when, after a few fine days last month, I mowed the lawn down to its usual height that I discovered part of the reason it was looking even more verdant than I’d hoped. In an unhappy variation of the cliché about woods and trees, I hadn’t seen the moss for the grass.
I have since spent what felt like a day wandering about the lawns with a pack sprayer, squirting litres and litres of diluted sulphate of iron on my new enemy. This has turned the moss a hideous black. I presume, though much less aesthetically pleasing than the green, this means it is dead.
But now what?
I really don’t know. So I need readers with some expertise in this area to mansplain what I should do next. Will the grass begin replacing the dead moss as spring growth begins this month? Or must I spend enormous amounts of time (and money I don’t have) getting on my knees to purge the dead moss by hand, then throwing bags of fertiliser about before attempting to resow, all the while hoping the surviving hens of the apocalypse don’t scarf most of the seed?
With so many other jobs to be done about Lush Places, there must be a low-cost, low-energy, chicken-free solution to get the lawn back to its normal shabby state of grass mixed with quite a lot of lawn daisies and clover.
Your mansplaining answers, along with encouragement, ridicule and commiserations, may be dispatched to me, via June the postie, at Lush Places, RD6, Masterton.
There are, at least, Narcissus erlicheer and other daffodils in the garden and lambs in our pastures to divert my rising panic about the yard work that still needs doing before this long, frosty, foggy winter ends.
Encouragement has arrived, too, in recent mail from readers. Firstly from Clare, our most devoted correspondent from Wellington, who sent us, among other things, an amusing photocollage of Michele’s head atop Nancy Mitford’s body.
And last week, Susan and Peter sent us a cheery card from “chilly Taupo” saying how pleased they were to read we have sheep back in our paddocks once again.
“Masterton, like Taupō, has endured one of the coldest winters for some years,” they write, “so we thought this card would give you a taste of spring that we are all looking forward to.”
It has. The illustration on the front is of snowdrops – and there’s not a single patch of moss in sight.
