All sun and no rain makes the lawn a dull thatchbed. We were staring at it not a week ago, willing ourselves to deal with it. Today, along came Thomas from CPS with his auto-de-thatching machine on a routine door-to-door business venture. The timeliness of his arrival combined with the specificity of the equipment immediately conjured an image of Sylvester McMonkey McBean, but McBean was a con artist and Thomas and his trusty supervisor were like a whirlwind of thatch shredding and raking and bagging. They even helped us haul the four bags of dead, heavy lawn slough into the garage.
When you have a south-facing front lawn, it gets beaten by the sun. The ravages of this particular summer made the post-thatched lawn look like Skynet decided that grass was too dangerous. "How much did you say the over-seeding was again?" says I.
So they over-seeded, too. And cleaned up the sidewalk. And were very polite and amiable and not at all pushy.
The front lawn was done in under an hour. Nice.