Remember my "redo the lawn" saga from a few posts ago? Mark did it... on Friday he took a vacation day, which he spent digging up our lawn. Once he was done with it, it looked like this. He also planted plenty of grass seed. He buried some of the seeds beneath the surface, but there were a LOT of seeds on the surface, as well. I was concerned that the local birds would take one look at our seeded patch of soil and cheer, "BUFFET!!! All you can eat!" Fortunately, so far we've only had one pigeon who's come a-visiting for a free lunch. However, this grass takes 4 to 6 weeks to sprout, so the wait is far from over in the "guard our lawn-to-be from invading flocks of birds" department.

On Saturday, the lawn-care guys came. They take care of the grass for nearly our whole block, which is to say they cut it with a weed whacker as needed. As you can see from the photo, nobody's lawn is big. They barely qualify as being small. So this job's not extremely daunting, but it IS a big help to people who are elderly, or who work all day and don't have time to fool with even a miniature lawn like we have.

They took one look at our ex-lawn and chastised Mark for not telling them in advance what he was planning to do. Then they smoothed out the ground completely, since it'll be a lot easier to cut... er, weed-whack the grass evenly if it grows on nice, flat ground. If we'd left the ground all lumpy, as it was in the first photo, cutting the grass with anything at all -- weed-whacker, mower, whatever -- would have been a royal pain in the neck.

So now we have a nice FLAT bird buffet... um, future lawn. We've also been keeping the bird feeder full of REAL birdseed at all times. I figured that if we let the birds fill up on the seeds they're known to like and are SUPPOSED to be eating, they won't be hungry and eat the grass seed. We'll see if it works.