Listening to the songbirds on my morning walk or feeling the warmth of sunny days are sure signs summer has settled upon us. Indeed, one could make an argument that we are well past the middle of the summer season.
But for me, the first sure sign of summer has always been when you can hear the buzz of the lawnmowers. Yes, summer has finally chased away winter when I awake to the sounds of lawns being cut.
Fortunately for me, I live in the country and mowing lawns is not a high priority task. I actually have four automatic lawn mowers doing a wonderful job on some of my property.
Horses are great lawn mowers, so I don't wake to the buzz of mowers.
But in town and for many individuals, mowing the lawn is a weekly ritual that starts some time in May and runs well into September or even longer.
It is a strange ritual, though, as I have never heard anyone proclaim "I love mowing the lawn" or "Oh, boy, it's the weekend - now I get to mow the lawn!" Indeed, getting out with the old four-horsepower Briggs and Stratton is, for many, a chore. And one to be avoided at all costs if you talk to the kids.
Yet it's something that we all do. Perhaps more peculiar is the fact that after spending an hour or so lopping the heads off of all these blades of grass, we then dutifully water the lawn and dress it with fertilizer, thereby ensuring that the grass will grow and we will have to engage in same ritual again next week.
I mean, for most of us, grass is a strange crop to grow as we simply harvest it and throw it away.
I mention this because throughout the years, there have been various attempts to try and introduce a more natural, environmentally friendly, alternative lawn to North America.
Many people don't realize that grass is an imported crop to most of Canada. It is not a native plant.
In fact, if it didn't look so nice and green, we would probably declare it a weed. Increasingly, academic groups, environmentalists, and even industrial concerns are arguing grass should go since maintaining a lawn or an unnatural crop harms the ecosystem and is expensive.
Still, each year, we cultivate grass literally growing millions of tonnes of the stuff to add to compost piles or ship to municipal landfills.
It has been estimated that Canada has over 2.5 million acres of land dedicated to growing lawns.
That is an area about twice the size of Prince Edward Island. This is land which could be used for growing food.
A total of 2.5 million acres could provide an awful lot of potatoes or corn or carrots or zucchini.
Could there be some good associated with growing a lawn? Could grass be, for example, a sink for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?
This question is being studied but the difficulty is finding out what is the true balance of inputs and outputs. For example, say every week you pull 10 kilograms of grass off of the front lawn and to do this, you use a gas powered mower that uses a quarter litre of fuel. Is this a good trade with respect to carbon dioxide?
At first glance, it might appear so. After all, grass is made of carbon dioxide and water from the atmosphere.
Removing the carbon dioxide and trapping it in gas clippings surely must help address climate change.
Even though you are burning up 250 grams of fuel and making carbon dioxide, this must be more than offset by the 10 kilograms of grass or the two kilograms of carbon that have been removed in the form of grass clippings.
However, this assumes that the grass that we have clipped will never decompose and return to the atmosphere which is, unfortunately, not a valid assumption.
Sequestering carbon in plants, alive or dead, is only a short term measure.
The carbon will be released - most likely as carbon dioxide but more problematically as methane - at some point in the future.
Of course, this is a hopelessly simplistic analysis because we have to take into account all of the energy used to make the fertilizers and pesticides used on the lawn, the energy consumed to provide the water for keeping it green, the energy involved in getting all of the lawn care products and for disposing of the wastes, etc.
The list goes on and on.
Each year, with the return of summer, we start our ritual of growing and harvesting this strange crop.
Yes, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence but maybe the question should be "At what cost?"
