Debbie Joann Thomas, age 10, of Indianapolis, Indiana, for her question:

Mere do grass seeds come from?

As we know, the family lawn should be mowed every single week during the summer growing season. This keeps the grass from sprouting tall greenery at the top and letting its lower notches turn broom. It also stops the green grassy lawn from going to seed. And nobody gets a chance to see for themselves where grasses for sowing new lawns come from. You can solve the mystery by not mowing for a few weeks. In which case your shaggy lawn will become a miserable disgrace to the neighborhood. But this is not necessary.

Lawn grasses are partly tame cousins of the wild, weedy grasses that grow in meadows and waysides. They will show you how gasses grow seeds. Left unmowed, they shoot up fast through the spring and early summer. Then they sprout tall stems topped with plumy tussles and feathery fans. These are their seeds and when they ripen the breezes scatter them far and wide. If we did not keep our lawns neatly mowed, they too would sprout shaggy tufts of seeds, as the wild grasses do.