May in Midland Park is a soil month — the flat, sunny lots out toward the Wyckoff line warm early, and anything put in the ground over the next three weeks gets a running start. Fairway Estate Garden Center brings a gardener's patience to lawn work: seeding and topdressing the thin spots, feeding turf on the schedule the grass actually keeps, mowing and edging once the growth takes hold. Beds are cleaned, mulched and weeded, and shrubs are trimmed with an eye toward what they will do next year rather than only this week. A lawn thickened from the roots up looks nothing like one that has merely been shortened, and by June the difference is plain from the sidewalk. Slow work, and these are the kind of yards that pay it back.