Hay?

Pop quiz - What did I spread all over my yard this weekend?

I'll make a straw-man proposal: it's straw, man. This weekend we aerated most of the back yard, seeded, fertilized, and spread milky spore to cut down on the japanese beetles. Christi found info on the web saying that a layer of straw is good for keeping warmth and moisture down on the grass seed/sprouts, and can be mowed in as compost once the lawn starts to grow. I'm just hoping that the whole exercise goes better than last year, when I tried to re-seed half the yard WAY too late in the summer and ended up with scorched earth for the rest of the year.

Things I've learned in the process:

• hay has seeds, straw doesn't
• straw/hay generates lots of very fine dust when you break up the bales
• this dust is not pleasant to breathe
• my back yard can be covered using approximately 1.25 large bales of straw
• I can be covered with dust using much less straw

In related news, we handled the trickiest spot in the yard (over the top of the septic tank, average depth 1.5 inches of crappy topsoil) by planting a quick flower garden in a few inches of new topsoil/manure/peet mixture contained with a couple of 4x4s pulled out of the scrap pile. Thanks to C&K for bringing us some of the lilies torn out of their garden - the new centerpiece for ours!

(Note the straw all around the new garden, and the hose for the sprinkler setup to water the yard obsessively until the grass gets going. Went to the hardware store for an extra hose-splitter so that we could run three hoses/sprinklers and have full coverage without walking on the grass seeds to re-set the sprinklers. And I only soaked myself twice setting up the sprinklers!)