Last week I introduced the Internet to some of the targets of a landscaping laborer’s mangling ministrations, and in this Saturday edition of LAWN TERROR I’ll be taking you through some of our equally clumsy and imprecise devices for getting the job done!

Well, apart from mulching plugs, the use of which essentially amounts to buttfucking your lawnmower without lube.

A WARNING: The sheer variety and lethality of the landscaper’s arsenal may stagger and befuddle the uninformed, but know this: Mother Nature would like nothing more than to see clean, hard-working human men and women such as yourselves forced out of their home and jobs by unhealthy floral elements. Lawn-care professionals need nothing less than the most up-to-date array of tools in order to stem the unending tide of leafy intrusions springing from Gaia’s viridian vagina.

CHAPTER TWO: YOUR WEAPONS

LAWNMOWERS

Ask any landscaper which machine he uses most often, he’ll invariably respond by saying “my lawnmower.” It is incredibly important that you flee the conversation at this point, because if you don’t then with his next breath the landscaper will begin listing all the things wrong with his piece-of-shit lawnmower. And believe me, there will be something wrong with it. No gas-powered lawnmower manufactured in the past fifty years has performed to its owner’s satisfaction; maybe it’s too heavy, maybe it doesn’t bag properly, or maybe it’s too slow. Maybe the tires are bare. Maybe it gets terrible gas mileage.

Or maybe it has a handle set-up that was designed by retards for aliens where, in order to keep the blade lowered while engaging the engine, you must crush your thumb between two steel handles every FUCKING time you mow some old motherfucker’s goddamn lawn.

Honda to Rest Of Planet: "Lick our taints."

Seriously, how do you fuck up a lawnmower handle this badly? Put the fucking blade control on TOP of the main bar and the fucking engine control on the BOTTOM of the main bar, and then nobody has to mangle their fucking hands trying to operate one of your shitty thousand-dollar-a-pop mowers-

Hey! Wait a minute! Where’s everybody going?

WEED TRIMMERS

Uneducated louts might tell you that weed trimmers are typically used for precision cutting in areas lawnmowers can’t reach, but they are lying. The true purpose of a weed trimmer is to launch pebbles into your co-workers’ faces at speeds approaching seventy miles an hour, and anyone who says differently has obviously never finished a workday with half a gravel pit embedded in one cheek.

SPREADERS

Fly spreaders (such as the one above) are actually pretty unobjectionable tools. You pour some powdery shit in the top, you push it, and then that same powdery shit comes flying out the bottom at high speed. There’s very little to fuck up.

Drop spreaders, on the other hand, have much more personality. See, you only use drop spreaders when the powdery shit you’re spreading is powdery shit that you very much don’t want to be breathing, such as iron phosphate (a common mosskiller.)

Cheeky little bastard.

Drop spreaders work fine in theory, at least until you’ve been using them for thirty seconds and some little piece of grit in the teeth makes it stop working. Intelligent landscapers will solve this problem by fiddling with the opening mechanism, eventually dislodging the grit. Unintelligent landscapers will thump the spreader against the ground several times, sending clouds of iron phosphate in the air like some sort of noxious fireworks display. Guess what kind of landscaper I am.

(It’s important to note that iron phosphate isn’t actually poisonous; believe me, if it were I wouldn’t be typing this right now. It basically dries out your skin something fierce and makes everything taste like nails for a while.)

AERATORS

Aerators are perhaps the best argument that landscaping is less about beautifying unkempt yards and more about fucking up Mother Nature no matter the cost. See, aerators drive large hollow spikes into the ground over and over, depositing the retrieved earth onto lawns in convenient little turd-shaped cylinders. If there were a weapon like that, it would be banned by international treaty in seconds.

There are also hand-powered aerators, like this one, for when your lawn has really pissed you off and you want to make it suffer.

What’s more, there are people who claim that aerating is good for lawns. That is how much people hate nature; when shown an implement that can stab a lawn hundreds and hundreds of times, these people will say “Yep. Musta had it coming.”

DE-THATCHERS

In the same way that insult typically follows injury, dethatching typically follows aerating. A dethatcher is basically a cylinder covered in long hooks that reach down and tear up all the dead moss and grass that accumulates on a lawn over the year, while also breaking up the little dirt dog-turds left behind by the aerator. To further illustrate that, imagine being stabbed a dozen times and then having someone wax your chest.

HAND TOOLS

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a picture of a double-bladed axe that isn't from World of Warcraft or that isn't covered in fakey dwarven runes or some shit? FUCKING NERDS

Apart from wimpy little weeding implements, hand tools are fucking boss. I dare you to prune a blackberry bush down to nothing with a pair of lopping shears, chop down a cherry tree with a hacksaw, or even just dig a bigass hole with a spade without feeling like a big tough man afterward. Granted, you’ll likely be a big tough man with severe muscle fatigue covered in various cuts and bruises, but if you wanted to live a painless life free of open wounds you shouldn’t have become a lawncare professional, jerkass.

Tune in next time for the third and final installment of LAWNTERROR: CHAPTER 3: TROUBLESHOOTING.

Even though producing and publishing top-grade internet comedy meets my financial needs in ways that most men can only dream of, sometimes I get a hankering for an honest day’s work amongst the little people. Or even nine hours of honest day’s work, five days a week, in the beating sunlight and blisteringly fresh Vancouver Island air.

Yes, I have recently found gainful employment with a local landscaping company. The Comox Valley (where I live,) houses many such businesses, as it also has the world’s largest population of retirees living in houses with yards that are far beyond their means to maintain. This means that basically anyone with a lawnmower, rake, and a truck to carry them around in can slap a phone number on a business card and have a hundred clients inside a week. I’m doing my best to avoid outright calling landscaping a conspiracy to take advantage of the elderly, but after two weeks on the job it’s pretty hard to see it any other way. In our defense, those octogenarians are totally asking for it.

"No, don't bother telling us your hourly rate, we'll just sign a cheque and leave it blank."

Sadly, a landscaper’s lot is not all hoodwinking the infirm. No matter how many codgers you bamboozle, eventually you will have to scape some land. But if you, like so many other amateur landscapers, balk at this daunting proposition, fear not! I have prepared several exhuastive glossaries of terms to help smooth your transition from Normal Human Being to Lawncare Professional.

CHAPTER ONE: YOUR OPPONENTS

THE LAWN – Your primary foe. A well-kept lawn is nothing so much as it is segregation in action: a patch of level, fertile ground has been strewn with good, wholesome grass seeds that are not to be sullied by association with impure, shiftless weeds (bushes and trees are allowable on a lawn so long as they keep to themselves, but we’ll get to them in a minute.)

Just look at that clean, pure, healthy lawn! I bet that lawn never commits any crimes or worships any heathen gods.

Besides being constantly mowed, lawns need the following actions to be performed with varying regularity in order to stay healthy:

- Weeding (once per week)

- Fertilizing and Liming (no more than once every two months)

- Moss control (once a season)

- Aerating and De-thatching (once a year)

- Pedicures and Manicures (whenever the lawn is feeling down)

- Pep Talks (for when the lawn’s self-confidence has been shaken by harsh language)

- Fervent Worship (once at sunrise, once at sunset)

- Blood Sacrifices (when you have incurred the lawn’s wrath or once every Winter Solstice, whichever comes first)

- Foreplay (whenever you feel your lawn needs a little “extra attention,” if you get my drift)

- Trimming (whenever you mow)

FLOWER BEDS

Sometimes, when there is little to no mowing to do at a client’s house (or when your boss is feeling like an asshole,) you will be tasked with cleaning up flower beds, a job for those seeking to contract arthritis in both their knees AND their hands but don’t feel like planning two separate activities.

Flower beds come in two distinct varieties:

- Regular Dirt Beds: the standard variation for people who like growing plants. Full of dirt, weeds, rocks, and flowers. Take the weeds and rocks, leave the dirt and flowers.

- Rock Beds: the variation for idiots who have no goddamn business owning a flower bed, or a house for that matter. Rock beds are made up of golfball-sized white stones spread thickly on top of black canvas, the theory being that this will make them easy to maintain. This theory is retarded, because weeds grow everywhere, and all these proud homeowners have accomplished is the installation of an ugly shitpile that can’t be weeded using tools costing several hundred dollars.

Oh, look! Someone put a big fucking pile of weed-infested rocks in the middle of your lawn! And you paid them to do it! Smooth thinking, dipshit.

TREES AND BUSHES

Despite their daunting size and menacing foliage, trees and bushes are nowhere near as dangerous as their vicious outward appearance might make them out to be. Possibly the greatest danger a tree faces to the careless landscaper is trepanating him as he blunders blindly into a low-hanging branch while mowing (which, admittedly, is fairly unpleasant.) Bushes are more docile than their taller cousins, though some of the more ornery species can cause unsuspecting lawncare professionals no end of grief by ensnaring them in their spiky tentacles.

On the whole, however, the relationship between a properly cautious landscaper and these noble flora is a healthy one. On the part of the landscaper, that is, because most of his interactions with trees and bushes involve him cutting parts off of them (or, in rare cases, removing them altogether, which means that he gets to use the really fun tools.)

You people seriously have no idea how great it is to just wail on a tree root with a pickaxe. It feels AMAZING.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself here – CHAPTER 2: YOUR WEAPONS will be published later this week, and will detail all those lovely implements that the modern age has blessed the humble lawncare professional with. See you then!