George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Bringing Back My Zombie Lawn

September 14th, 2021

   Last year at this time, I was laboring behind a heavy, gas-powered dethatching machine, tearing up the remnants of a dead front lawn.

Here I am digging up dead turf with a dethatching machine last September.

   Nearly the entire quarter-acre of thatch-infested grass died following weeks of punishing late-summer heat and no rain.

   I’d never lost that much grass before, and I had to reseed and water, water, water the whole wretched expanse.

   My GreenView blend of Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, and fine fescue came up nicely and looked reasonably good by late fall and into this spring.

   But when summer heat returned, I ended up with a thin lawn infected with red-thread disease and outbreaks of crabgrass, nutsedge, and a host of broad-leaf weeds (oxalis, clover, plantain, dandelions, spotted spurge, etc.)

   After a dry spell in August, my zombie lawn was looking sickly, brown, and weedy.

   I thought I’d share what I’m planning to do next since 1.) these setbacks are fairly common when starting or replacing a lawn, and 2.) many of you no doubt have struggling lawns, too.

   After all, this is the best time of year to do something about it all.

   I should first mention that I’m not a lawn fanatic who’s shooting for that perfect green carpet.

   I’m also not a fan of the big lawn I inherited. A quarter-acre of it is more than I would’ve wanted, and if I were 20 years younger, I’d be replacing the majority of it with garden beds so that the lawn served merely as the paths between the beds, as was the case at my previous Cumberland County home.

   My new lawn in the Pittsburgh suburbs is a problem child for several reasons.

   One is that the underlying soil is rock hard – a compacted, sluggish, blackish clay that looks like something on the way to becoming coal.

   Another is that the lawn is on a busy traffic corner (asphalt on two sides) and has sloping east- and south-facing exposures.

   That means it’s a site getting extra heat and hot summer breezes from the roads and cars and is getting maximum-sharp rays from the afternoon sun.

   Those roadside perimeters also are getting road salt from winter plowing, which amplifies the effect of summer dryness on grass roots.

   On top of that, the lawn has a history of neglect bordering on abuse – information I picked up from neighbors.

This ‘n That

September 7th, 2021

   Let’s catch up this week on a few gardening shorties and news tidbits you might find useful…

Roundup soon will have a different formulation — without the controversial glyphosate.

The end of Roundup as we know it

   Did you hear about Bayer AG’s announcement that it plans to pull the controversial ingredient glyphosate from its Roundup weed-killer?

   Roundup has been the most popular herbicide since it was introduced in the 1970s, but it’s come under fire in recent years under suspicion of causing non-Hodgkins lymphoma (a form of cancer).

   While Bayer and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency maintain that glyphosate isn’t a threat to human health or the environment, the company has been losing a string of multi-million-dollar lawsuits lately.

   To limit “litigation risk,” Bayer says it’s phasing glyphosate out of the consumer version of Roundup by January 2023, meaning gardeners will have to rethink what some have used as their go-to weed-control weapon for decades.

   This doesn’t mean Roundup itself will be gone.

   For one thing, Bayer’s voluntary pullback doesn’t include professional and agricultural sales. That means the current glyphosate-based formulation of Roundup will still be available for licensed applicators in commercial settings and for farmers to spray on crop fields.

   Second, Bayer isn’t taking the Roundup brand off the market… just changing what’s in it. No word yet on what will replace glyphosate, but Bayer has earmarked billions of dollars for research into new weed-killing agents.

   If you’re not a chemical gardener in the first place, the change will have no impact (other than affecting what neighbors around you are spraying).

   But if you’ve relied on Roundup, you’ll have a few decisions to make, i.e. switching to other sprays that continue to include glyphosate, trying the new Roundup formula to see how well it works, or switching gears to fight weeds in other ways.

   If you need weed-fighting help, check out my 2015 post on “Winning the Weed War.”

Where does your rainfall go?

   Gardeners tend to be way more concerned about getting enough rain than what happens to rain after it leaves our yards.

   If you’ve ever wondered where your runoff goes, Pittsburgh web developer Sam Learner has developed a free online tool that creates a customized video of the course rain takes from your yard the whole way to the bay or ocean.

New Life for the Vegetable Garden

August 31st, 2021

   Labor Day shouldn’t mark the beginning of the end for the vegetable garden.

Many of the same cool-season crops that grow here in spring can be replanted for fall.

   As spring-planted summer crops are harvested or wind down, new crops can take their place to keep the veggie plot chugging along well into fall.

   With a little protection, some of them can even keep producing into early winter.

   The cooling weather of fall is perfectly suited for many of the same crops that we plant in late winter to early spring for late-spring to early-summer harvest, i.e. lettuce, carrots, red beets, broccoli, and cabbage.

   Rather than let the vegetable garden run its course until post-frost cleanup time, savvy gardeners replant this time of year.

   The warming climate makes fall harvests a better bet than ever.

   The third week of October used to be the drop-dead time frame when you could figure a killing frost would put an end to the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other summer fare.

   Tradition held that that was when you “put the garden to bed” by yanking everything and giving the whole plot a good tilling (which, by the way, is now regarded as a bad idea because it harms soil structure, wastes soil-borne nitrogen, disrupts soil microbes, and stirs up weed seeds.)

Read more on why fall tilling isn’t a good idea

   In some recent years, we’ve gone well into November before facing the first serious freeze.

   Other years, we’ll get a brief brush with below-freezing nights in late October, then go back to warmth for another couple of weeks.

   Why cede that time when we could seed it?

   Why not reload the garden in late summer so that it’s still fully planted until real cold is here to stay?

How Much Grass Seed Are You Really Getting?

August 24th, 2021

   You might assume that a bag of grass seed contains all or mostly grass seed, but if you pay attention to the labels, you’ll find that’s usually not the case these days.

Read those grass-seed labels. You might be surprised what’s in the bag.

   Many bags of retail grass seed contain only half grass seed with the rest made up of fertilizer, coatings, fillers, and other “inert” materials. Some lawn-patching products even contain up to 90 percent of non-seed ingredients, primarily paper.

   It’s easy to tell how much actual grass seed you’re getting for your dollar. The Federal Seed Act, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, requires grass-seed bags to spell out the amounts and varieties of each grass seed inside as well as the percentage of the bag’s weight that’s devoted to non-seed materials.

   Although the format can vary, seed companies must label their bags with several standard pieces of information.

   These include germination rates, where the seed originated, when the seeds were tested, when they should be sold by, and the percentage of weed seeds.

   Two of the most important categories are the makeup of the grass seed and what else is in the bag.

   Federal label laws require companies to list the percentage, by weight, of each of the specific grass-seed varieties in the bag. By adding these together, you can tell what percentage of the bag’s total weight is actual grass seed.

   Bags then must list percentages of other ingredients, which can include coatings (typically fertilizer), weed seeds, and “inert matter.”

   Inert matter is a catch-all term for anything else that doesn’t grow. It includes unavoidable left-overs from the seed-cleaning process, such as chaff, broken seeds, and seed stems, but it also can include added fillers or mulching materials, such as sawdust or paper.

   When companies don’t add fillers, percentages of other materials typically add up to less than 2 percent of the bag’s weight.

   Read the labels, though, and you’ll find the percentages of coatings and inert matter add up to 50 percent or more on many of them.

Good Plants I Can’t Grow

August 17th, 2021

   No matter how much you know about plants or how many right things you do, sometimes plants just die.

Some people can do lupines like this. Not me.

   Like it or not, it’s a fact of gardening.

   A lot of the time, easy expiration is a shortcoming of particular plants, such as how dwarf Alberta spruces are spider-mite magnets, or how hosta and daylilies are candy to deer, or how delphiniums, heather, and lady’s mantle fry in our increasingly hot summers.

   That’s why I didn’t feel too inferior when I killed the persnickety blue poppy, a gorgeous spring bloomer that’s very happy in Vancouver and Great Britain but adamant about not moving to Harrisburg.

   My wife once bought me a pack of blue-poppy seeds and challenged me to grow some. I got a few to sprout inside, but only one survived the transplant… and that one died over the first winter before ever thinking about throwing out a petal.

   Failure, yes. Understandable? Also yes.

   Far more troubling are the “enigmas.”

   These are the plants we should be able to grow without much trouble, and, in fact, are ones that most people grow with their trowels tied behind their back.

   For some reason, I have a few enigmas that just won’t grow well for me even though they seem to thrive in other people’s gardens.

   I suspect I’m not alone in that… although I’ll bet enigma plants are different ones from gardener to gardener.

   For me, I can’t keep a lupine alive to save my life.

   I thought these spiked hybrid beauties just didn’t like our heat, and so I filed them in the general don’t-do-well-here category… until I heard several other local gardeners tell me how much they love their lupines.

   Apparently, lupines don’t mind sweating it out in some gardens. Just not mine.