Why I Oughta...

I had a little lawn care breakthrough this past week.  Turns out....I don't have Poa in our lawn.  We have a bent grass called Nimblewill .  Since last Fall, I've talked about how I needed a plan to deal with what I thought was Poa Annua in our backyard .  I s ketched out the notion of a full back renovation and even included the idea in my 2022 to-do list.    But, as I was thinking about the timing of killing that (presumed Poa), I started to dig a little deeper on the Web.  I pulled a blade of my invasive grass and compared it to what I found on the Web.  It wasn't looking like Poa.  Then...I found this page from Purdue's Turf Science Department that talks about Nimblewill .   Purdue describes Nimblewill thusly : Nimblewill (Muhlenbergia schreberi) is a warm-season perennial grass found throughout the northeast, southeast, and Midwestern United States.   ...It grows well in moist, shady areas but it is also found in dry, sunny areas. Nimblewill spreads vegetatively t

I saw this bag of Lesco 19-0-7 lawn fertilizer with pre-emergent at one of the big box stores recently and thought it was worth tracking here for both price and N-P-K makeup.  For reference, Milorganite has a 6-4-0 N-P-K and based on what I've both read/watched and my initial soil testing, finding something like this that has a # in the Potassium part of the equation is, inherently interesting to me.  At $68 a bag, it is a little bit LESS interesting, though. This post and photo, however...reminds me that I NEED to keep an eye on my 2022 lawn care schedule as I'm planning on making some changes to the treatments this year - especially as I try to balance my historical heavy N-P's in the N-P-K analysis.

In March, I shared the bag of Halts (no lawn food) that I had secured before Amazon started to slow down their shipping during the pandemic and referenced the Michigan State University Growing Degree Days tracker .  Welp...today is the day:  we're right in the middle of the "Optimum" range so it is time to put down that pre-emergent.  You can see where April 2nd lines up in the screenshot above. My bag of grassy weed pre-emergent that I have from Scott's covers just 5k square feet.  I have about 15K square feet of turf, so this covers just part of my lawn - and I've been focused on the very far back 5k square feet.  That's where I applied this year's batch .  I'm trying to set a reminder for myself that I should throw down another round of this stuff in the Fall to take on the Poa that I think is taking over parts of my lawn.  I went back to my ratty Scott's Edgeguard spreader for this job of what reminds me of cracked corn: I'll be

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&q

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