Stinky Things Stink

Image courtesy of shutterstock

Since buying our house I've learned a lot about home maintenance that I never knew before.  Like all the things you have to do to keep a lawn green and clean.  On Monday I mowed my lawn after a two week hiatus.  I figured that it was time to do this after we lost our son in the front yard during a safari to the mailbox*.

My lawnmower has an awesome bag on the back that keeps the clippings so that I can dispose of them in a responsible manner instead of leaving them on the lawn to ruin the surviving grass.  It's the first time that I've used the bag and I expected my whole lawn to produce five or six bagfuls since the grass was so long.  Do you know how many bags I had to dump**?  Fifteen!  Now, I'm not quite sure of the count as I may have lost count at around seven or eight, but it was a lot!  I had a great idea to dump these bags of grass in the backyard in a spot that already had a large pile of sticks that the previous owner had left for us***.

At the time, I thought, "This is great!  I'll just compost these grass clippings and use the compost in my garden!"  Well, two more 90+ degree days later and I go in the backyard and I'm assaulted by an awful decomp smell.  You know those scenes in CSI when they find a week old body and they're all making faces?  Yeah, that was me in my backyard yesterday.  I had assumed that someone saw that pile of grass clippings and decided that it was a good place to dump a body****.  This ended up not being the case as I moved the grass clippings into several garbage bags I didn't ever end up finding a body.  This, I guess, is a Good Thing™ as finding a dead body isn’t on my Bucket List or anything.

Of course, spending two hours scooping up rotting grass clippings with a pitchfork isn't exactly what I'd call fun.  It smelled horrible and it was warm!  The whole pile was radiating this awful heat and smell.  I took a twenty minute shower afterwards and I swear that I still smelled bad afterwards, even though my wife says otherwise.  I didn't end up getting it all as I wasn't really willing to pick up rotting, warm and smelly grass clippings with my bare hands.  I just hope the smell goes away by our kids' birthday party this Saturday.

The whole point of this post, other than to entertain, is to let you know that you probably shouldn't put large piles of grass in your backyard if you're not willing to deal with the smell.  I had good intentions, but I'm not willing to put up with the smell just to have a compost heap.  Perhaps if I can get one of those self-contained deals, I will try it again, but I'm probably just going to end up putting it all in a yard waste trash bin that my garbage man sells.

On a completely unrelated note, frequent readers of my blog might have noticed that I haven't done a Story a Week in since...holy crap!...since May 28th.  That is very sad to me.  My excuses for this are many and varied, but they are also lame and not really relevant.  I should be writing more since the more I write the better my writing will get.  At least that's the theory.  So, expect another Story a Week sometime this weekend.

*May be an exaggeration for comedic effect.
**Of course you didn't know before I told you.
***This was very generous, of course.
****Not really, but at least the smell wouldn't have been my fault then.