The problem is that it does not break down the way almost everything else does.
It survives cutting. It survives drying. It survives composting at full heat. It survives passing through the digestive system of a cow and coming out the other end into a manure pile.
And it stays active in soil for anything from several months to three years.
You do not need much. Parts per billion will deform a tomato.
So a lawn treated with it produces clippings that are, for the next year, a chemical delivery system for anything with a broad leaf. Which is every vegetable I grow except the corn.
Every reputable applicator knows this and every reputable applicator tells you.
Randall Culp had his lawn done by a company called Emerald Tier in the March.
Emerald Tier gave him a printed customer notice, as they are required to. One page. Three paragraphs. The second paragraph tells the customer, in bold, not to compost the clippings and not to give them to anybody for compost or mulch for at least one full year, and gives the reason.
I have seen that notice. It is in the file now.
It sat on the counter in his kitchen for weeks. Trina saw it. She remembers seeing it, because she remembers thinking it was a strange thing for a lawn company to bother printing.
She did not connect it to anything, and I have never once held that against her and I want it written down that I have not.
What I have had to work through is the other thing she told me, in the July, at our own kitchen table, crying.
She had asked me to let it go three times.
He’s my brother. It’s grass, Des. You’re going to make Christmas impossible over a fence.
And on the morning of the wheelbarrow she came out and said don’t, and I did not, and I have thought about that a great deal.
She was not protecting him. She was protecting the family Christmas and the phone calls with her mother and eleven other things that were about to become difficult, and I understand it completely, and I did exactly the same thing for four months every single time I raked a pile up and said nothing.
The garden was already dead by then. The chemical was in that soil from the March.
Neither of us could have saved it by June.
But I had four months of piles and three direct conversations and a family dinner where he said it out loud in front of everybody, and at no point in any of that did either of us make it a real problem for him.
PART 4 — THE ANNIVERSARY
The family dinner was not a dinner. That is my own softening and I should stop doing it.
It was Trina’s parents’ fortieth anniversary, in their back yard, in the May, about twenty-five people.
I had brought a tray of tomatoes in. The last good picking off those plants, as it turned out, although nobody knew that.
I was carrying it across the grass when Randy came over.
He lifted that tray out of my hands — both hands, no difficulty, I did not fight him for it — and set it down on the ground next to the cooler.
And he said, to twenty-five people:
“Give me that. It’s basically the same yard. Nobody here wants to hear about your grass again. Now sit down and let it go.”
