UPDATE 13 Oct 2004: First Blade! After a week, of no grass, I reseeded an three days later, I have my first blade of grass.

When I first moved out to Caifornia, I was shocked to discover that earthquakes don't happen every day and movie stars don't parade around Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, all of my friends back home had a completely different question they would ask: "So can you, like, grow grass out there?"

I'm fairly certain that they were not talking about Kentucky Bluegrass. And these are fairly straight laced people too. They just assumed that everyone in Californiajust did it. It turns out that the aswer to thier question (within the scope of state law) is somewhat ambiguous around here. However, I do not grow any because:

1. I have no desire to break federal law.
2. I wouldn't know what to do with it if I did manage to grow any.
3. With respect to plant life, I am death incarnate. (Exibit A, Exibit B)

About a year ago I got tired of apartment life. Since I didn't have the requisite half million burning a hole in in my pocket, buying anything here in the Bay Area wasn't going to happen. But if I couldn't have a house, I decided I could atleast have a lawn.

The planter is built from those drop tray things that go under plant buckets. A 14 inch tray with some holes sits inside a 16 inch tray. The bottom is covered with a layer of gravel then some soil. The grass seemed quite happy in this setup for a while but then I made the mistake of letting it outside. The next day lawn was looking a little scruffy. As a watched, a cute little flappy bird landed on the edge of it. As I was admiting his landing skills and flare timing, he began to tear at the lawn. He was literally ripping it out by the roots! Occasionally he would pause to look up at me as if to say, "What are you gonna do about it from that side of the window, human?"

So I did the only thing I could think of: I opened the window and shouted, "Hey you damn birds, get off my lawn!"

This seemed to work, but the damage was done. The little bugger had torn up a good third of the lawn completely and done a good ammount of work on what remained. Over the course of a week the rest of the lawn died off.

I think Lawn v1.0 can be said to be a failure, at least with regards to grass production. After a year of brooding, I've decided that my previous experiment failed for a number of reasons:

1. Planting depth too small: The tray things only had about 4cm of depth. This may not have been deep enough for the root system. Version 2.0 will be much deper.
2. Seed density too low: Perhaps more seed would have produced a more robust system. Version 2.0 will double the average seed density.
3. Total crop area too small: With a larger area, it may have been possible to recover from the damage caused by the birds. Version 2.0 has roughly double the surface area.
4. Vulnerability to scavengers: Birds eat grass seed and make nests from stalks of grass. Version 2.0 will employ Decoy the owl decoy. Decoy has successfully detered magpies from nesting near my fridge for over two years.

A wise man once said, "The true measure of a project is the tools you have an excuse to buy". While a wheelbarrow or one of those gas powered, two-stroke, man portable tornado generators would be cool, they might be over kill on this scale of project. I started with a single planter, some topsoil, and a few hand tools. I still had over half a box of grass seed for version 1.0. The plastic drape was left over from the Flugtag. It turns out that I still had some gravel, a bag of crushed lava rock and some compost mulch left over from Version 1.0.

I started out with a base of this little tiny gravel chunks left over the the Ant Farm project.

To this I added some crushed lava rock left over from Version 1.0. Hopefully this will allow some of the water to pool below the level of the soil.

I decided to use the left over compost mulch on top of the gravel. It's full of all sorts of good stuff like bark, roots, twigs and at least one huge spider that moved into the bag while it was in storage. I didn't notice the poor spider until I had burried her. I couldn't seem to find her by poking around, but then again I really didn't want to go poking around an angry spider of her size. I used the topsoil on top of this. The topsoil is the only stuff that Home Depot had that scutally looked like dirt. Everything else was this loamy, froofy stuff (technical terms).

At this point I found out that my grass seed was MIA. I think I may hve given the box to a friend to patch his lawn. Anyway, it was off to Home Depot again. SInce I was there, I picked up another plastic planter thing since they were cheep and I had extra soil.

The second planter started off with the remains of my lava rock supply (note: This lava rock comes in hefty bags and is very cheep). On this one I added the topsoil first then used the mulch stuff. If anyone feels the need to see what my toes look like, they can be seen at the bottom of the rest of the pictures. Fear my photography skills.

I chose Scott's Pure Premium 'Sun & Shade' grass mix for this project because I really have no idea how much sun the balcony gets. Also, it was cheep and came with a box of fertalizer. The box holds 226 g and I think I used a little over half, maybe 150 g. It contains 34.80% Perennial Ryegrass (80% germination rate), 34.14% Chewings Fescue (85% germination rate), 29.90% Kentucky Bluegrass and 1.16% GKW (Inert Matter). It claims to be 99.99% weed free. Thus, I probably planted 15 mg of weeds (0.004% of 150 g). Of course, since it's sitting outside, I'll probably pick up some more.

I covered the seeds with soil and added water. I ran out of the mulch so I used a few handfulls of topsoil to cover the last of the seeds on planter two. I have decided that the first planter (topsoil on top) will be known as the front lawn and the second planter (mulch on top) will, henceforth, be called the back lawn.

Here we see the entire 'garden'... such as it is. The two plants in the foreground are Alpha and Beta. They are apperantly Elephant Ears plant things that grow from a garlic like bulb. Alpha seems to have sent up an entirely new stalk (hard to see in the picture above) so I now have to come up with another name. I'm thinking something along the lines of Alfa, Antena, Adam, Aleph, Apple, Albert, Alberta, Atlantic or Additional. For some reason, they keep coming back after I forget to water them for a few months.

• Drainage: Right now, there is no drainage. The water will pool in the bottom of the planter and be wicked up as required. The only method of water loss will be evaporation. It ws been pointed out that this may not be ideal. I'm thinking of retrofitting the planters with a drainage system. It's really cool and will require an almost orthoscopic implementation.
• Automatic Watering: I have an automatic drop watering system. I just need to find a way to make it work with my setup. Alternativly, I would tap water off the automatic spriklers around here. This would provide an automatic timer system and water for free. I'm not sure how to well this would go over though.

Questions can be mailed to garden _AT_ insanitech.com.