I have never aerated my lawn. I wasn’t familiar with the need for this procedure until I started getting emails from my lawn service. Basically, they said I needed to put holes in my lawn to stimulate growth. If holes are so good for your lawn, why did they charge me $129.95 in June to eliminate grubs and moles? I thought they were already doing a great job.
Recently, my wife and I arrived home from a Sunday brunch and saw our neighbor Steve wrestling with what appeared to be a 200-hp lawn machine. The really strange part was that Steve was not aerating his own lawn, but Norm’s lawn — an apparent act of great selflessness, unless you consider that he had simply lost control of the behemoth and was desperately trying to steer the machine back to his own front yard. Then Mark, watching Steve from his living room window, came outside to request that he be given a chance to aerate. Norm also wanted in. This scam was so ingenious that it made Tom Sawyer look like an amateur.
I don’t think I’ve ever said or written the word “aerated” before. If it weren’t for spell check on my computer, the first line of this story would have been: “I have never airrated my lawn.” Once, I accidentally went from liquefy to aerate while making a strawberry shake in my wife’s blender. That’s the extent of my experience.
Mark explained to me why it’s important to aerate your lawn, but that required that I listen. I kept hearing the word “plugs,” which made me mildly interested because I once had a hair transplant. During the operation, the surgeon put more than 1,000 plugs in my head. My hair does look a lot thicker now and there has been no sign of moles. I had one grub.
Norm was now being whipped into unspeakable contortions and had to pull the emergency button after he aerated Mark’s newly paved driveway. After observing my neighbors, I agreed to try aeration myself. I took hold of the handles, pressed the bar and was quickly propelled into action.
I had never realized how exciting it would be to poke holes in a lawn. It was the most fun I’ve had in my entire life. But four seconds was way long enough. I soon passed the privilege back to Jeff, who happily aerated his yard again. Twice as much work, but twice as many holes.
Aerators make me nervous. They are huge, powerful and potentially very dangerous. Someone could get hurt. There should be a background check if you buy or rent one. Jeff could see I was uncomfortable with an aerator in the neighborhood, but he put my mind at ease.
“Aerators don’t poke holes in lawns,” he told me. “People poke holes in lawns.”
That made me feel so much better.
