I've been having issues with my lawn lately. When my wife and I moved into our house about a year and a half ago, we had a blank canvas to work with: the front yard had some taller-than-me fire bushes concealing half of our house, there was a small rosebush on the side of the porch, and the backyard had a mass of flowering vines climbing along one side of the fence, but that was about it. There was some grass in the backyard, too, but overall our landscape wasn't much to look at. We're hoping to change that, one small step at a time.

We've added some native-plant beds next to our garage in the backyard, planted some small trees (several of which have died for unknown reasons - R.I.P.), and over the past few days I've been trying to get rid of all the grass on our highly sloped front lawn with some low ground cover and shrubbery, as it's quite difficult to mow even though I've been using a light-weight push-reel mower (which, unlike some people, I've found to be a terrific tool: it uses no gas or electricity and is healthy for the lawn.) Right now our front lawn looks like a paper-recycling center, as I covered much of the grass with layers of damp newspaper and topsoil as we wait for a chance to run to the store for some mulch to cover everything and make it all look better. Until then, my neighbors must think I'm crazy: I've already had several strangers stop their cars in the middle of the road, windows down, shouting 'What are the newspapers for?!?' I simply smile and say 'Reading!'

(Pretty soon, I'll have fresh compost to use as well, which is cooking in my backyard bin, shown to the left, as I write this. So my neighbors must think I'm even crazier for recycling paper in the front yard and soon-to-smell-like-a-landfill detritus in the back.)

If my grass-killing experiment works (maybe I should just let my dogs run around the front yard to destroy the grass like they've done in the backyard), then I can be confident in the fact that I proved to my neighbors that I'm not crazy. If my trial fails, though, I can save face by doing what I should've done in the first place: hiring professional landscapers from the List.