Bookie's Most Outrageous Moments #2

The Lawn
As a new homeowner, I wanted to take care of the lawn and make it look nice and green. The couple we purchased the house from left us with some nice landscaping around the house. I thought it would be a good idea to complement the landscaping with a groomed lawn.

My first idea was to put fertilizer on the grass so it would get lush and green. I had purchased the fertilizer but I didn't have a spreader. I knew my co-worker had a broadcast spreader but he wasn't available at the moment and I wanted to take care of the lawn right away. My only option was to borrow my neighbor's drop spreader. What a mistake. When you're used to a broadcast spreader, a drop spreader is just torture. Based on the size of my lawn, I would only need a half of a bag of fertilizer for the entire lawn. Well, I set the spreader wrong and dropped half of what I was going to use on the whole lawn in one small area in the backyard. To top it off, I left huge gaps between each of my rows. Realizing I used too much fertilizer, I hooked up the sprinkler and soaked down the yard so I wouldn't kill my grass. What I ended up with was an evenly-striped backyard with lush, green grass and pale, weedy grass.

It doesn't stop there. A week or so later I decided I wanted to kill the big weeds around the yard with some weed killer. I bought some stuff that would take care of the job and walked around spraying and killing every weed I could find. After I was done and satisfied that the weeds were adequately annihilated, I read the label on the spray bottle. The product I was using to kill the weeds was also designed to kill grass and any other plant life. Every location I sprayed for weeds left about a 6 inch brown spot of dead grass and weeds. We had a heavily striped and pokadotted backyard for the entire summer.