When it comes to lawn care, my father has always insisted on doing it the hard way. No shortcuts or modern conveniences for him. After my parents bought a new house in San Diego in the early 1970s, he refused to break up the soil with a Rototiller the way most people did. His more thorough alternative involved digging a foot down with a shovel, pulling the rocks out, and forcing the dirt through a mesh screen. Eventually the whole family joined him, flailing at the hard clay soil with pickaxes and shovels like a band of suburban sharecroppers.

One day, as I chipped away at the unyielding dirt, it occurred to me that lawns were pretty unnatural in Southern California. You had only to look at the expanses of mesa untouched by bulldozers to know that what grew naturally was mesquite and manzanita. If you wanted a lawn, it meant lots of hard work, starting with installing a sprinkler system and remaking the top eight inches of soil in your yard. Once you got the grass established, you had to water it twice a week in warm weather. If you wanted it to be a deep, lush green (and who didn’t?), you gave it periodic doses of nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Then there was the weekly or biweekly mowing, edging, and weeding to keep it looking trim.

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