Why I Oughta...

Nat added this bag that you see at the top of this post to one of her recent orders from Amazon.  It is a bag of Scott's Crabgrass and Grassy Weed Preventer under the "Halts" product name.  It does NOT have lawn food in it - which is fairly uncommon in most crabgrass preventers. You can find this stuff here at Amazon (this is NOT an affiliate link.  I don't do that...) for $16.99. I used this same product last year - and sought it out because of the fact that it doesn't have lawn food in the mix.  Last year, I held off on feeding my lawn until Memorial Day and I'm thinking that I'm going to do the same. I laid out my full 2020 lawn care plan here in this post from February .  In that post , you'll note that I'm calling for an application of this pre-emergent in "April" versus "mid-April".  And that's because that I'm going to turn to - once again - Michigan State University and their "Growing Degree Days...

One of the amazing things about being online today is that there is a community on the Web for just about any niche interest you might have.  Take...for instance Lawn Care DIYers.  There's a bunch of YouTube "Stars" (I hesitate to call them Stars, but I also am *not* going to call them Influencers because, well, that's just gross.), there are online forums and plenty of bloggers.  There are also tools that have historically been used by the Turf industry (think Golf Course Managers) that have now been set free into the world. One of them is the use of Growing Degree Day Calendars.  What are Growing Degree Days ?  From Wikipedia : Growing degree days (GDD) are a heuristic tool in phenology. GDD are a measure of heat accumulation used by horticulturists, gardeners, and farmers to predict plant and animal development rates such as the date that a flower will bloom, an insect will emerge from dormancy, or a crop will reach maturity. And it turns out, there a...