Why I Oughta...

The post I created about Wild Onion removal a few days ago made me realize that I have to get my thoughts together on a 2020 lawn care plan.  In order to do that, I thought it would be valuable (for me) to collect what I did last year so I can determine what I want to do this year. For reference, I have a cool season lawn made up of Kentucky Bluegrass.  I cut the front long  all season and the back is done shorter with my Husqvarna Automower . If last year was my *first* year of digging in and working the turf on my own, this year, I'm going to try to learn from my mistakes ( burning with fertilizer ) and successes (not pushing the lawn too much with food) and continue on my path towards 100% non-synthetic applications.  Because of the Creeping Charlie, I'm not certain that I'm going to get there this year, but we'll see. 2019 Lawn applications/treatments by Season Spring: April:  Bought as much Milorganite as I could find:  8 bags .  32# bags. April:  Bega

'Tis the season for fireplace burning in our house - and likely in yours.  That means that you'll have to deal with the ash that gets left behind after the wood burns.  We burn hardwoods exclusively (so far this year, we've burned Cherry and Birch) and that means we end up with hardwood ash.  Turns out, it has value in the garden as a soil conditioner and fertilizer.    According to the Oregon State University (Notice...I did include *the* for those other OSU lunatics) Extension office , hardwood ash can aid in making the soil an environment that supports plant and tree growth.  From the OSU Extension article : Because wood ash is derived from plant material, it contains most of the 13 essential nutrients the soil supplies for plant growth, according to Dan Sullivan, OSU Extension soil scientist.  "When wood burns, nitrogen and sulfur are lost as gas," Sullivan said, "but calcium, potassium, magnesium and other trace elements remain. The carbonates a

This photo is a week or so late, but putting it down here in the [ garden diary ], so I remember that I 'threw it down' late this Fall.  I put one bag of Milorganite out on the front yard (all three parts) on Thanksgiving Day this year.  That makes what I'd call two (2) Fall feedings this year including the Sunday Beta granular program that I participated in earlier this year (October).  And all in, this is the 5th feeding (4 Milorganite, 1 Sunday) in addition to 1 Humic Acid, 2 iron and 1 calcium applications.  Application #1 of Milorganite around Memorial Day this year.   An application of granular Humic Acid in June this year .  Application #2 of Milorganite was around the 4th of July this year  (spoon-fed) Application #1 of Ironite (to the front) at the end of July this year .  Application #2 of Ironite (to the front) in August of this year .  An application of Mag-i-Cal to the entire yard in September this year .  Application #3 of Milorganite was around

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the details of how I was participating in the Get Sunday Large Yard Beta Test for fertilizer .  They shipped me a couple of bags of granular product and a large hopper Chapin broadcast spreader.  In that post, I disclosed that I wasn't thrilled with the Chapin spreader - and put down too much of the product in the location I was loading.  From that post : I ended up spreading a little bit too much in one spot. The spreader had a little malfunction (operator error??) so when I was filling it the first time, I ended up dropping A LOT of the product in one place. This Sunday GrowGreen product isn't billed as 'non-burning', so I'm assuming that I'm going to get a big burn spot. I did my best to get as much of the product out of the one spot - first by hand. Then with my blower. Then I watered the heck out of the area to try to saturate the turf with water in a hope that watering it down would do something? We'll see wha

If you're like me, and you follow lawn/landscape/gardening people on Instagram, you've likely been targeted with a fertilizer product called Sunday .  They're a 'better lawn' company that can send you - on a schedule - a tailored nutrient plan that is healthy (for kids, pets and the environment), easy (just arrives and you have to apply it) and effective (will keep your turf in a good spot).   That's a really powerful value proposition, right?  I want something that is easy to put down.  Something that works - and keeps my lawn green.  And...importantly....I want it safe for my kids and dog.  I've gone to organic with Milorganite and I don't think I want to go back to a synthetic.   Of all the Direct-To-Consumer 'subscription' services that have popped up, I think the two that meet me right where I am are a furnace filter one and a lawn care/fertilizer one.   Unfortunately, the furnace filter service(s) are tailored to people that ha

A week ago, I posted some photos of my yard as a way of documenting where I was in the lawn care Summer process and talked about how it was a mixed bag:  the turf appears green to the eye, but when you look closer, it appears that there's some 'melting out' or leaf spot or something else happening below the surface.  Before I post about what I ended up using to try to cure (and, potentially....prevent) that, I wanted to get in the [ garden diary ] a post about Ironite.  I've now put down two treatments of Ironite this season with splitting a bag on the front yard with the first 1/3rd of the backyard.  I put the first one down around Memorial Day and just put the second one down in early August.  What is Ironite?  Well....it is 1-0-1 lawn fertilizer.  But, I think of it more of as a color-agent.  From the Pennington site comes this description : Nothing greens like Ironite Turns yellow to green Provides quick greening Won’t burn For all soil types NPK 1-0-

This is the first season that I've taken a high degree of interest in our lawn.  This is also the first time that I'm cutting the grass (in the front) by myself.  For the past few seasons, we've used a service to cut the front (while Go-Go - our Automower - cuts the back) and I wasn't ever really pleased with how they worked our lawn.  They came every week, no matter what and that, I think, made for a less-than-ideal lawn for us.  There were some ruts that I fixed this Spring with seed and I think generally, they were cutting it too short and coming EVERY WEEK just to put in the billings.  I get that.  They're running a business.  But, when the price increases came this Spring, I just decided to buy a lawnmower.  My FIRST lawn mower and cut it myself.  The front itself isn't very big (including the parkways and the side strip on the other side of the driveway, we're talking less than 2,500 square feet), so it doesn't take long.  And, once I started t

I thought this stuff was non-burning?  I'm certain that this is the location of the broadcast spreader when I was loading my bags of Milorganite before the 4th of July.  I would normally not load on the grass, but the whole "non-burning" promise of Milorganite made me believe that it would be fine.  If you look closely, you'll see some black bits laying around.  I've learned my lesson with Milorganite.  Don't believe the label when it says non-burning. Here's a very close-up of the same spot: See the Milorganite in there?  Turns out...it *might* burn your lawn and if you put down too much in one spot... it WILL BURN YOUR LAWN. 

There I was...walking through the garden center of our local Home Depot and what do I see?  A half of a pallet of bags of Milorganite.  Shortage?  What shortage ?!?  I mentioned the potential Milorganite shortage in my initial post about starting to use the stuff . There were about 30 bags of the fertilizer on the pallet.  Did I take all of them?  Nope.  But, I did take 12 bags.  That's two applications for this season.  If I go back and see more, I'll buy 12 more to hoard for a late Fall and next May application.  I also used the Menards site to see if they had inventory and to my surprise, every Wisconsin location is loaded!  Thinking I'll likely take a drive to Kenosha on a weekend we're up at the lake. At the top of the post is a photo of six of the bags.  Below are the other six.   (oh...and a bag of Ironite!) I've thrown down one application of Milorganite this year and after I get the results back from my SoilSavvy test, I'll know how to proceed

This year, I'm trying a few different things with my yard including tending to it by myself (instead of having someone else cut it), trying Milorganite instead of a traditional 4-step synthetic fertilizer program, mixing and spreading my own herbicide blends and even trying to use a soil temperature tool to time the application of various things .   There are a few more things that I have planned including the application of this product you see in the post above.  But, first...a soil test.  Yes, I'm going to test the soil we have, but I'll post more about that when it arrives.  I have a few choices to make in terms of how to pick the areas for testing. Now, back to this package of The Andersons Humic Acid.  As I've talked about in the past, I've been spending more and more time looking at other folks on YouTube talking about their lawns and what-have-you and one of the products that I've seen a few times now is Humic Acid.  I poked around and this art

Adding this to the [ garden diary ] here on the blog to remind myself (mostly) that I put down 15 fertilizer tree spikes near our Frans Fontaine European Hornbeam Trees that we put in last year.    I put two on each tree but the most Western one that got just one.  (7 trees x 2 spikes) + (1 tree x 1 spike) = Feed trees for the spring.  I am going to supplement the last tree (and maybe a few others?) with a direct application of Milorganite (or the generic that Menards claims to be selling soon). What made me decide to go with these Jobes Fertilizer Spikes again is that the tree leaf that is featured on the packaging appears to be a Hornbeam leaf (or something like it...) so the product seems fit for purpose, right? I last showed the view from our screened porch BEFORE the Hornbeams went in here , but to mark the fertilizer application, I took a similar photo and am sharing it here below.  The angle is different, but I wanted to show the leafy-ness of these trees prior to the a

If you spend any amount of time on YouTube watching lawn care videos, you've certainly come across Milorganite.  The fertilizer product is being evangelized by the loudest/most-popular voices across the YouTube Lawn Care Nerd community .   Recently, I was talking to my folks about how I was going to try this organic product on my lawn and my Mom instantly recognized the name Milorganite.  Turns out, my grandma was an organic gardener and she used the stuff back in the 1980's and 1990's. I went off to find the stuff at Menards and was unpleasantly surprised to only find eight bags in the whole store.  I asked around and the guy there said there was a shortage.  This was all they had.  A quick Google search turns up this post from last Summer where the team at Milorganite said they were experiencing a shortage indeed . Could this be bad news?  The product is impossible to find and I only have eight bags to my name.  Each one covers 2,500 square feet.  That means, I hav

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 are GDD

Who knew there was a proper way to walk your lawn fertilizer spreader?  I suppose this is kind of common-sense, right?  If you have the spreader opened up all the way, you simply walk back and forth and make turns at the end of the lawn each time.  This is similar to how I cut the grass.  (I actually cut the grass like this about 50% of the time, the rest of the time I do the 'cut from the outside in and walk in a circle with each lap getting smaller' manner.) But, the 'half-rate settings' pattern is A LOT more complex.  You basically overlay a whole additional set of steps on top of the first.