Goedjn wrote:
On 31 Mar 2006 10:46:50 -0800, "Samantha"
wrote:

To get the best performance, I would suggest not using commercial
fertilizers, but an organic program with only emergency resort to any
chemicals such as fertilizers or herbicides. It sounds like you're
trying to maintain a fairly large lawn with golf-course quality


To put it another way... you shouldn't be concentrating on growing
a good lawn, you should be concentrating on growing good dirt.

If you manage that, the lawn will take care of itself.

Yeah; high potency commercial artificial fertilizers end up leaving a
lot of waste ammonia in the soil, and as you can imagine that
effectively sterilizes it; so unless you've got a real need to "bulk up
fast", concentrate on creating and maintaining a renewable ecology, so
to speak.

You can get chicken poop fertilizer which is pretty good and not strong
enough to kill off the soil. Somewhat less potent and less frequently
seen is cottonseed meal (I think that's the name; cottonseed something
), but when the chicken flu hits the US next summer and chicken-based
products start to look scary, it's something to keep in mind.
Otherwise, the actual nitrogen fertilizing ability of "natural"
products is not too hot, even horse/cow manure, so conserve your soil
by using a mulching mower, or at least composting the clippings and
returning them; if you do compost, then you can toss in your fall
leaves, potato peels, etc. too. Let the grass grow on the tall side so
it can feed itself effectively, that also conserves water. The local ag
station tells us that rabbit poop (composted) is even better than
chicken poop, but I've not seen any commercially available, so find a
friend who raises rabbits.

The local university extension or state ag service might have a free
soil analysis which is a godsend if they give you advice.

As for weed killers and bug killers, you kind of have to give up.
Natural nontoxic bug and weed killers just don't work as well as the
artificial items, which can have undesirable side effects; but I find I
don't need artifical weed killers with a reasonably healthy lawn, and
I've got a favorite bug killer for special occasions.

I'm not big on weed killers, my main enemy is dandelions and my main
weapon is this gadget I got from Home Depot for $20 that you stomp on
and it plunges a bunch of nails down around the root and rips it out.
The virtue is that you don't have to bend over. After two summers of
rigorously working out my tensions after work on the little yellow
flowers, I'm pretty well dandelion free. The other side of the thing is
that a few dandelions do a great job of digging the nutrients out from
the deep soil below the grass roots and then you can compost them and
feed the grass, if they haven't gone to seed. Clover is not a weed,
btw, it's a benefit to the lawn, it produces more nitrogen than it
uses, if you have big patches of clover just leave it and if you have
creeping grasses (see below) the grass will move in by itself when the
soil is ready. Some organic-type fertilizers for the spring now contain
corn meal gluten as a weed seed germination inhibitor, it apparently
keeps little weed seedlings from rooting effectively if you treat the
lawn early enough in the spring. I don't know how effective is, but it
can't hurt.

As far as bugs, I'm not a devout tree-hugger, but at this point the
only "artificial" treatment I use is imidacloprid for fighting grubs,
because a bad grub infestation will really devastate your lawn in one
season and I haven't got any other bug problems. I'm not an expert, but
after investigating all the toxic bug products, I decided imidacloprid
is about the safest, and it seems quite effective. It's still under
patent by Bayer, comes under the name Merit sometimes; used to be in
Grubex, then they took it out for some kind of licensing reason, now I
think it's back in; anyway look for imidacloprid in the ingredients.
It's a nicotine derivative, and nicotine turns out to be a lot more
toxic to insects than other species (even earthworms, let alone
mammals) except a few species of fish, so in the amounts used for lawn
treatment it looks to be much safer than most of the insect poisons.
(They also use it in those once a month cat flea treatments, and cats
don't do well at all with toxins, so it's got to be relatively safe for
mammals) The catch is you have to be proactive and use it in the early
fall when the grubs are feeding but you don't yet know they're there;
most folks wait until the spring and see their lawn is dead, and then
go out and kill the grubs after the fact. But it's easy to tell if
you're going to have a bad grub year; if your screen door is covered in
those little brown chafer beetles in the summer at night with the porch
light on, it's time to buy the imidacloprid. If not, I let it slide.
They say to apply it by the end of September, but again the local ag
station has had decent results with it through midOctober. But you do
want to get them before they start to eat your lawn, not after they're
through.

Otherwise, about the only other advice is, if you're going to reseed
part of the lawn, just try to match the type of seed to the area. The
net has a few writeups on kinds of grass; you have to match your
general climate first, cold or warm, then realize that grass that grows
in the shade doesn't like to get stepped on and grass that can tolerate
being stepped on won't grow in shade. "Creeping" grasses spread out
underground and fill in holes in the lawn, but "bunching" grasses
don't, and won't invade your flower bed. If you get a match with those
characteristics, you can pick around for things like cold or drought
tolerance. And beware "annual" ryegrass (as distinct from perennial,
which is a standard lawn grass), which can be up to 90% of some mixes;
like the name suggests, it will die in the winter and not come back
next spring. Makes a good fall/winter cover for your vegetable garden,
though.