“Please grow, baby! Please grow!!!”

No, no – we’re not pregnant – and you should be ashamed of yourselves for even suggesting such a thought to a guy that isn’t even married yet! We’ll deal with that slippery slope soon enough, but today we’re here to talk about an entirely different baby of mine that most certainly has made it loud and clear that she needs a bit of tender love and care as of late…

My fiancée.

No, just kidding. Well, of course, she needs love and tenderness, too, but as far as I know, right now we seem to be doing a-ok in that department!

But you’d let me know if you heard anything otherwise…right?

Anywho, where were we?! Oh yes – my lawn! That’s what all of this fertilizing jargon is talking about, and while I’m most certainly quite happy to have transversed the domestic line between apartment-dwellers and those who are contained within four exterior walls that are exclusively their own, but at the same time I’m also learning that there’s a lot of extra work that comes from living in an actual house! A garage to sweep, gutters to clean, a perimeter to spray for bugs that will otherwise cause one’s previously-mentioned fiancée to wake you up by screaming at three o’clock in the morning when she finds one roughly the size of Nevada crawling across the bathroom tile floor, but from my own personal experience thus far, said gargantuan spiders still pale in comparison to the plights that I’m facing with regards to our less than green front lawn right now.

And you’ll notice that I’m very quick to mention merely the front lawn, as opposed to the entire thing from front to back surrounding our little domicile here in the middle of suburbia because, well, actually one of the first things that I learned about lawn care as we got ourselves settled was that it’s not entirely uncommon for people to put completely different kinds of grass in their front and back yards. Here, I would’ve thought that “grass is grass,” but apparently that goes to show just how next to absolutely nothing I seem to know about lawn care, eh?!

So the grass seemed to be doing ok for a while – we’d managed to rid our land of several massive colonies of evil fire ants last fall and glided through the winter months thinking that there really wasn’t all that much to this here “lawn care thingy.” Every once in a while we watered it (thank god for automatic sprinklers!), every once in a while we cut it (thank god for cool guys willing to brave the hot Florida sun to mow for a nominal fee!), and we certainly had ourselves a green Christmas, but now that it’s started getting warmer, our once-beautiful lawn has started taking a turn for its crispy, brown worse.

Well, the front yard has, anyways, which believe you me was even more confusing to watch our luscious backyard flourish while the front turned to absolute crap! We started watering more and even invited a fire ant or two to move back in, just in case its success was somehow influenced by those venomous, little devils, but still – nothing. I’ve considered just buying a few rolls of that green, prickly plastic carpet that you use outdoors that kind of looks like grass, but something tells me that our landlord might not take to kindly to such an “enhancement.”

Also, it would probably be a bitch to vacuum.

So instead, as you’ve probably deducted by now from the title of this column, we’re taking a different route and are now trying our hands at fertilizing the old girl back to her mid-20s, wild and sexy, yet still responsible enough to hold down a full-time job that doesn’t involve wearing a chicken suit-like self. The stuff that I bought was some spray by Miracle-Gro, which I figured was pretty fitting because at this point it feels like it might very well require a full-fledged miracle to get our lawn looking even minutely healthy again.

Errr, front yard. Sorry about that, backyard – didn’t mean to imply that you aren’t looking as ravishingly beautiful as ever!

Hmmph – lawns!You can’t live with ‘em, you can’t play a rousing game of croquet or host a backyard barbecue without ‘em…