In the summer of 2022 I was very busy. This is not unusual. I am frequently busy. In this case it meant that I did not notice that my sprinklers were failing to hit a large section of lawn. Or rather, I did notice early in the summer that maybe I should figure out what was going on. Then suddenly it was August and the middle of my lawn looked like this:
The next spring I got the sprinklers fixed and decided to use this as an opportunity to change up that section of lawn from grass to clover. A clover lawn uses less water and is lower maintenance while also being better for local pollinators. I scattered seeds everywhere. Some of them sprouted, but mostly that section was a big patch of dirt for a year.
This is the view today, two years after my failures:
It is a little hard to see in the distance image, but the vast majority of the filled-in space is thriving clover. The remaining dirt patches have tiny green sprouts from the seed I tossed down a month ago. Re-seeding has worked beautifully. Now I just need to keep throwing clover seed over the rest of the lawn so that the clover can gradually win. There are so many other things I also need to be doing for my garden space, but I’ve got so much on my plate that I suspect this is going to be a benign neglect sort of year for gardening.
For today I’m going to enjoy the sunshine and the fact that sometimes mistakes are the catalyst for new ways of doing things and surprising new growth.