So, the lawn and grass at the house we're buying has been very carefully maintained and it looks amazing. Lush and green, few to no weeds...

I'm pretty sure they must treat it with something. We would love to keep it looking the way it does right now, but aren't most of those fertilizers bad for the environment? Or maybe bad for biodiversity?? Or are there ways you can keep a lawn looking nice without using bad stuff?

We also don't want to do anything that's super high maintenance, mowing is fine of course.

The plot is 0.8ish acres, so quite large by the standards around here.

What do WTFers do for your lawns?

The grass:

There are several schools of thought even on this board. I may be in the minority but I’vebeen in charge of parks and office park campuses in the past and this is how it’s done.

With a yard that size you’re no longer dealing with with lawn care but instead you’ve graduated to turf management. If you want the grass to look anything it does now you’re going to have to maintain it.

In Spring you’ll apply a fertilizer on it that has a pre emergent weed killer and a crabgrass killer in it. If you’re going to do this the time is no, although as green as that grass is I’d be willing to bet it’s already been done. If you don’t do that you’re going to get crabgrass (nearly impossible to pull out by hand, especially on a lawn that size,) dandelions by the score (you can pull those but it takes a while on a big lawn.) You can spot kill dandelions with a product like Weed-be-Gone but you have to do it pretty much every week. I did that my first summer here.

You’ll also get rough pasture grasses and bare spots in it if you won’t keep the grass you now have healthy.

Next thing to do would be to apply a fertilizer with a weed preventer and possibly grub control in it two times over the summer and once in the fall. It’s not hard to do but a lot of that size it will take a long time. I have a service that applies fertilizer using a big riding spreader for less money than I can buy the fertilizer for. Chemlawn and Tru-Green are the best known company but I use a local that charges me about 30% less. Chemlawn recommends 6 applications per season, I get 4.

After that the only thing you need to do is mow and maybe toward the end of the season if the rain isn’t taking care of it.

If you decide to do nothing the grass will grow but it won’t be the nice fine-bladed kind I see in the picture. It’s pretty much impossible to keep at least some kind of grass from growing here, but it’s mostly coarse, lumpy pasture grass with various weeds in it, most of which I never saw before I moved here.

See what your neighbors have if you want to see how that looks. Maybe it’s OK and looks like what the neighbors have. Only caveat is that once you let it go it’s very difficult to get back.

Is that an irrigation timer I see in the picture?

Thanks Steve, this is super helpful!!

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See what your neighbors have if you want to see how that looks.

Actually, the closest neighbors (across the street, diagonally across, and next door) all have very similar lawns to ours, I bet they're treating it.

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Only caveat is that once you let it go it’s very difficult to get back.

Yes, this is maybe the one piece of knowledge I already have.

Also, I found out that the current owner uses a local guy who does treatments once every two months (maybe he slows down in the winter, but it's warm here probably from March to Nov).

Anyway, the treatments are like $260-285/treatment.

On the one hand, that sounds like a lot... On the other, it's maybe not that expensive to preserve the status quo. And would be a lot more if we let it go and then wanted to bring it back.

Lots to think about...

At the very least, I want to keep it up for a few years, because if we were to move, a crummy looking lawn at this size would be a liability when selling, I would imagine.

So what is the environmental impact of the fertilizer? (I'm not too worried about watering, I don't think it's an issue here).

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So what is the environmental impact of the fertilizer? (I'm not too worried about watering, I don't think it's an issue here).

Chemlawn will tell you that by using the products they do and applying them properly they impact the environment very minimally. Hard to say how accurate that is but it’s nothing compared to say, corn. The same is true of the biodiversity issues.

If the biodiversity issue concerns you you can do nothing at all and you’ll have a nice little hardwood forest in about 30 years - just like the one they took out to build the house.

Forgive me for going on like this - you’re on a favorite subject of mine.

If you want to deal with some of the issues presented by 3/4 acres of turf you might consider repurposing some of it.

An orchard would be the easiest - plant a bunch of trees in an orderly fashion and stop maintaining the turf around them. This might make a nice screen from the street if you plant two rows and stagger them. A combination of fruit, nut, and ornamentals might be nice. You’ll never be able to use all of the fruit you’ll get from even a small orchard.

You’ll have to water them the first year to get them started but if you choose trees well suited to your area they should be able to get by on rainwater after that. Using dwarf specimens will help stall overgrowth and the “forest of trunks” effect. You could also run the trees across the back of the lot.

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If biodiversity issue concerns you you can do nothing at all and you’ll have a nice little hardwood forest in about 30 years

Definitely don’t want to do that!!!

The guy the seller uses is local, I’ll talk to him and see if I can ask what he uses.

Have I mentioned that I hate dandelions?

When they’re low to the ground and yellow, they’re kind of cute but when they grow tall and have those white seed balls, I don’t like how they look at all. (Does anyone?)

In response to your question: Yes, I like dandelions. They usually don't mature to the fluffball stage in a lawn that is regularly mowed.

They're presently plentiful in many plots of grass around my area now. I recently passed two adjacent commercial businesses in my area and it was quite apparent where the property line was because one was surrounded by nothing but green and the other had a very nice crop of dandelions.

A commercial I always welcomed seeing has a buff, shirtless young man wearing jeans out weeding dandelions from a lawn. The last scene of the commercial had a girl blowing the seeds of a dandelion in his direction. I don't remember what the commercial was advertising, but I definitely remember the commercial.

By the way, did you hear of the girl who was a wallflower at the dance, but a dandy lyin' in the grass.

Big Al

Steve's got everything well covered on the topic of conventional lawn care.

We have a quarter acre lot but I have taken out an awful lot of the lawn and replaced it with flower beds. We also have a lot of mature trees, so the lawn fights the trees for resources and it's pointless to try to grow a lush lawn in these conditions. That means I'm a lawn care minimalist. I haven't used a commercial fertilizer or pre-emergent weed product in decades. I broadcast some of my sifted leaf compost over parts of the lawn in the spring. I hand pull weeds when the spirit moves me; I call it weed meditation. That's pretty much it.

The guy who taught the turf segment of my Master Gardener class had some tips on reducing the use of lawn chemicals. He said you can skip the spring fertilizer because the lawn grows like crazy that time of year and doesn't need it. Don't know if you can get it from a commercial service, but I guess you could apply a pre-emergent without fertilizer to keep the weeds down.

He also said that grass wants to go dormant if temps get into the high 80s and above, and that fertilizing and watering during peak summer is really fighting its tendency to want to go dormant. Lawns thrive in England. They're not a good choice for most parts of the US. But for whatever reason, we're hooked on them and they’ve become sort of a standard.

Don't pick up clippings. Leaving them on the grass reduces the need to fertilize by at least 25 percent. Don't mow it too short; three inches high will keep the roots cooler and less stressed.

He said that if you're going to fertilize, do it in late summer/early autumn, and use a balanced fertilizer that's not too high in nitrogen.

The long read on the environmental impact of lawns, not just fertilizer..

https://psci.princeton.edu/tip...e-and-climate-change

You might want to contact the county ag extension office as pique mentioned in the other thread; they are usually a very good resource on topics like this.

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Originally posted by Steve Miller:

If the biodiversity issue concerns you you can do nothing at all and you’ll have a nice little hardwood forest in about 30 years - just like the one they took out to build the house.

Yea, I saw that too. The trees that were there might have been junk, but I would have much preferred a forest over the vast expanse of lawn that they created.

When we moved to this house in 1980, I was disappointed with how much shade we had and that I couldn't grow a lot of sun-loving flowers. Fast forward 40+ years, and I wouldn't trade my well-shaded yard for anything. The whole property is so much cooler in the summer, and I don't bake in the heat when I'm out working. I have one semi-sunny area that I grow my vegetables in, but the rest of the yard gets a lot of shade...

Thinking about it, they probably didn’t tear out a forest to build the house, they cut out a corn field.

The forest was cut down to make way for the corn field a long time ago.

I didn't read all the posts. But know that fertilizers and weed killers are biohazards. They kill bees. They kill birds. They kill fish. And they can make your pets very sick. They are also bad for soil health.

Please check out a strategy known as "Integrated Pest Management" which has been used very effectively in some communities. Your ag extension office (broken record here) should have a handout and plenty of info.

The idea behind integrated pest management is that by making conditions healthy for the desired species, the undesirable species go extinct.

In the case of a lawn, you want to discourage weeds and encourage grass, so you optimize healthy conditions for grass and then they will out-compete the weeds.

A typical strategy for lawns is to aerate them well, then spread a nice layer of compost over the entire lawn and water in. Weeds like poor and compacted soil. Compost and aeration are their enemies. A good landscaping company can do this for you. If you are lucky, you may even find a landscaping company that specializes in IPM.

If you think fertilizers are benign, think again. They are full of industrial waste and heavy metals. There have been some excellent muckraking exposes on this. And anything that is going to kill weeds is going to kill other things. It won't kill grass, but broad-leaved pesticides are dangerous to plenty of other living things.

I'm not one to go chase down links and studies when I have already done my homework. So if you do care about this, please check it out further.

Ag extension office! (broken record)

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Originally posted by wtg:

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:

If the biodiversity issue concerns you you can do nothing at all and you’ll have a nice little hardwood forest in about 30 years - just like the one they took out to build the house.

Yea, I saw that too. The trees that were there might have been junk, but I would have much preferred a forest over the vast expanse of lawn that they created.

When we moved to this house in 1980, I was disappointed with how much shade we had and that I couldn't grow a lot of sun-loving flowers. Fast forward 40+ years, and I wouldn't trade my well-shaded yard for anything. The whole property is so much cooler in the summer, and I don't bake in the heat when I'm out working. I have one semi-sunny area that I grow my vegetables in, but the rest of the yard gets a lot of shade...

Grass will outcompete trees every time. That's why you remove sod around a tree when you plant it.

ETA and clarify: this depends on the soil pH. More acidic soils will favor trees. More basic soils will favor grass. Most lawns benefit from a thin spreading of lime to keep the pH better for grass.

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:
Thinking about it, they probably didn’t tear out a forest to build the house, they cut out a corn field.

The forest was cut down to make way for the corn field a long time ago.

It very much depends on the area. Almost all of Pennsylania (Penn's woodlands) was forested before the white man arrived. There were isolated lakes and prairies left where the glaciers had covered the earth. By the turn of the twenteth century, less than 10% of those forests remained as the timber was cut and other parts were cleared for agriculture. Over the last century, most of the timbered areas regrew as second growth forests and many smaller farms were abandoned and also returned to woodlands. Now the vast majority of the state is again forested.

I can see this progression where I live. Looking at aerial photos from the 1930s, most of the township was cropland and pastures. In subsaequent decades, the farms disappeared and brush and then forests reoccupied the land. Beginning around the 1960s, land began to be cleared again, this time as the suburbs overran what had been a primarily rural area.

Big Al

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:

If the biodiversity issue concerns you you can do nothing at all and you’ll have a nice little hardwood forest in about 30 years - just like the one they took out to build the house.

Yea, I saw that too. The trees that were there might have been junk, but I would have much preferred a forest over the vast expanse of lawn that they created.

When we moved to this house in 1980, I was disappointed with how much shade we had and that I couldn't grow a lot of sun-loving flowers. Fast forward 40+ years, and I wouldn't trade my well-shaded yard for anything. The whole property is so much cooler in the summer, and I don't bake in the heat when I'm out working. I have one semi-sunny area that I grow my vegetables in, but the rest of the yard gets a lot of shade...

Grass will outcompete trees every time. That's why you remove sod around a tree when you plant it.

ETA and clarify: this depends on the soil pH. More acidic soils will favor trees. More basic soils will favor grass. Most lawns benefit from a thin spreading of lime to keep the pH better for grass.

We have very alkaline soil here; it's impossible to grow blueberries without a ton of work! Azaleas and rhodies, too.

My back yard's ginormous silver maple has a very shallow root system. The root knees come up in the grass all over the place. The neighbor behind me has five similarly-sized maples in her yard, and between my tree and all of hers, between the shade and the roots, the grass gets the short end of the deal. I have hostas in the large bed under the tree and somehow they do really well. I have no idea how they are surviving, much less thriving as they are.





The sugar maple in the front has deeper roots and the front yard is on the south side of the house so there's a more sun. The grass is a bit better out front. But to be honest, I really don't care that much about it. My neighbor does all the lawn treatments and slaves over his lawn, the full catastrophe. It looks somewhat better than mine, but not *that* much better. Certainly not worth the extra work and expense, at least not for me.