Letter To The Editor

(6/10/92)

To the Editor:

Early March of this year I left the Big Bad East where populations are suffocating in pollution and moved to Ogallala. At last, clear skies! My delight increased when a robin began building a nest outside my window.

One day, while chatting with a neighbor who'd just had her lawn sprayed and was watering in the poison, I saw a robin taking mud from her lawn. Oh no! It was "my" robin.

Needless to say, I never saw the robin again. The nest is abandoned to this day. Last week my neighbors had their lawns sprayed again. The next day I found a dead robin on my lawn, and a dead bumblebee. It was the third dead bird I've found on my lawn since I moved here.

My neighbors have lawns that are "perfect" — they look like astro-turf. They have no pretty clover or bright dandelions. I never see butterflies or bees like lawns had when I was a kid.

Well, spraying is cheap, they say, but the hidden costs are high. More's the pity when alternatives to spraying are available. There are grasses today that insects like the cinch bug, sod webworm, cutworm, billbug weevil and aphid find intolerable. These grasses not only repel insects, they are slow-growing, disease-resistant, drought-resistant, heat-resistant, and require little or no fertilizer. One Dr. Richard Hurley, earned his doctorate in breeding grasses at Rutgers University where he now teaches, developed a number of such grasses which he uses at his home in Pennsylvania. "I don't even mow it," he said. "I haven't fertilized in two years and it looks great."

If you want more information on these grasses, stop by the Ogallala Goodall Public Library and ask to see the article on this subject.

Nina Galen
320 West A
Ogallala
284-8364