Why I Oughta...

Last week, I shared here on my lawn diary a little breakthrough.  For the past 18-or-so months, I've been watching a grassy weed creep along and begin to migrate from my far backyard to closer to our patio.  And, after reading about various grassy weeds, I came to the (initial) conclusion that I was dealing with Poa Annua - or an annual Bluegrass.  It was showing some of the signs like being lime green.  But, after observing the lawn this Spring, I noticed that the parts affected green'd up later and seemed to handle the Summer better than the balance of my Bluegrass.   I was planning on doing a complete renovation in the back by killing EVERYTHING off and starting from scratch with a new layer of seed this Fall.  As I prepared for that, I went in to see if I could learn more about what was back there and how much I *really* needed to kill off vs. just overseed. When I went in and pulled a mature stalk of grass, I discovered it had this sort of horizon...

 I've grown my lawn care practice in various ways over the years based on things I've learned from the Web (mostly YouTubers) including how I (now) cut my lawn pretty high (5 on the mower), have added Tall Fescue to our KBG lawn to try to provide it more heat resistance and even using a blue pattern spray in my herbicide treatments to 'see' where I've sprayed .  My most recent project is focused on controlling a new (to me) warm season weed grass called Nimblewill. In order to do that, I'm going to use a selective herbicide named Tenacity.  Tenacity seems like pretty great stuff and can be applied as either a pre-emergent or a post-emergent.  The difference is that you have to also use a surfactant if you're going the post-emergent route. For this Nimblewill control project, we're talking post-emergent and actively growing grass. That meant that I had to go find a surfactant.  The most readily available one was this Liquid Harvest version available on Am...

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...

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.

I decided to do a couple of (new to me) things with my front lawn this year including some of the things that I've already covered like spoon-feeding a granular with Sea Kelp (applied at end of April and end of May - so far) .  But, this post is intending to cover two other new (to me) things:   First... I'm cutting it shorter than I've done in the past.  For the past couple of years, I put the mower ALL THE WAY up and cut at that length. I had a deep green lawn through most of the Summer and didn't get killed with a water bill.  But, the length came at the cost of neat-ness.  My e-Go mower doesn't have a ton of vacuum power, so there was always a lot of folded over blades. So, a risky change:  This year, I'm putting it on the 4th 'notch' out of the six on my Ego walk behind push mower.  Last year, I was cutting at six.  See below for the difference - which is about an inch shorter. And the second new (to me) thing - which is a companion to ...