Among the family conversations that seem just too difficult to attempt — including the one with your teenager about sex and the one with your wife about her weight — is the one with your husband about his grass.
It is infinitely harder to talk to a man about his lawn than it is to talk to him about, well, sex or his weight. And just the prospect of it had my fellow Master Gardening students shaking their heads in defeat as we left the lecture titled "Turfgrass."
"I'm not even going to try," said one my classmates, most of whom are women. "He will never listen."
Certainly there are men out there who detest mowing the lawn. My nephew is one. "I hate my grass," he will say, because it takes him away from beer, football or political blogs.
"Your grass hates you," I reply, because his grass looks like it hates him.
But my husband is not one of those men, and Saturdays in the spring will find him sitting on his lawn, pulling out Bermuda grass by hand. Saturdays in the fall will find him trying to catch the leaves before they hit the ground.
He departs for long assignments out of town but would not think of hiring anyone to cut his grass. I think he thinks of that as a form of polygamy because when I suggested it, he responded, "Fine. And the next time I want a sandwich, I'll call your friend, Betsy."
So I knew what I was in for when I carried my fresh knowledge about turfgrass home from class. Master Gardeners can be overbearing, what with all we have learned, but the care and feeding of grass has changed in the last 30 years, and I am pretty sure my husband hasn't.
To begin, I tried to tell him, don't feed your grass in the spring. It will encourage greening and top growth, and the lawn will look lush. But it is the roots you want to grow at that stage, the better to survive Maryland's notoriously dry summers.
This revelation was met with silence, so I babbled on.
You not only need to aerate your lawn every year, but you probably need to do it in spring and fall because our soil is so poor. Aerating, as you know, breaks the tension on the surface of compacted lawns, allowing the roots room to expand and giving the soil a way to take in more water and nutrients.
"Aerate at Halloween and fertilize at Thanksgiving," I went on cheerfully, nervously. "That gives the roots a little time to grow into the finger-sized holes the aerator has created, the better to take up the fertilizer."
These were small pieces of advice I learned during a three-hour class. I could have chirped at him for the better part of the weekend. But I let it go at that.
I mean, I never even mentioned soil testing. And I didn't say a word about the impossibility of eradicating Bermuda grass.
"I know you are really busy right now," I said to my husband, the sportswriter. "So how about if I hired somebody with a pickup truck to rent an aerator and run it over the lawn and return it for you? And then you can just run the spreader over the lawn with some fertilizer in a couple of weeks."
But I knew the answer before I finished the question.
"Fine," I said, defeated. "Do you want me to ask Betsy if she has whole-wheat bread?"
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