Here in the top left hand corner you can spot a neighbor walking a dog.The internet is an interesting place and like Field of Dreams, if you build it they will come. This means that when a suburbanite in Colorado set up a webcam and a domain for watching his grass grow, you can bet there will people logging on to watch it.
To the visitors of watching-grass-grow.com, Alek Komarnitsky is simply known as Mr. Grass. The Watching Grass Grow website was engendered when a serious drought struck Colorado in 2002. Mr. Grass’s lawn obviously suffered from water rationing and a friend bet him that the bare spots would not be filled in by July 2003.
Komarnitsky set up a webcam to track the changes and in 2005 he registered the Watching Grass Grow domain. On June 19, 2006, he started The Grass Blog for people to comment.
The webcam updates every two seconds and viewers can listen to the Rocky theme as the lawn grows at 1/25 of an inch an hour.
Mr. Grass waves to his viewers on June 10, 2015.Photo: Watching Grass Grow
Throughout the site, Mr. Grass shares screenshots of moments when the webcam caught something interesting happening. In the comments, viewers share their excitement when they see a garbage truck come by or some bunnies out in the yard. Most of the commenters are positive and share that they enjoy the peaceful nature of the webcam.
Mr. Grass also has posted time-lapse videos of his yard that speed up a year’s worth of footage. Komarnitsky has started other webcams, including the birdcam which watched a nest of house finches and watching paint dry when his house had a paint job done, but none have attracted the over a decade-long interest like Watching Grass Grow.
The website lists how many others are watching the front yard and it varies anywhere from 17 to 57. Even though nine times out of 10 while you are on the page it will look more like a photo than a video because nothing is happening, there’s a “blink and you’ll miss” sensation that comes over you as you study the image waiting expectantly for something to happen.
For those who do only want to tune in when there is something happening, Mr. Green now has a Twitter and shares when viewers can watch him mowing. While Mr. Grass mows his own lawn, he does use TruGreen to help manage the weeds.
Obviously, the site isn’t for everyone, but it is worth looking at just for the throwback early 2000s web design, if nothing else.
