Failure

Alas, not all goes as smoothly as my previous post. We are on our 3rd year of a chemical-free lawn, and all is not well. We have weeds everywhere, including large sections of crabgrass and clover. Bummer. But we have no one to blame but ourselves. After receiving instruction from Dale at Uncle Luke's on an organic lawn program, we developed our own modified program which I'll call benign neglect. Over the past 3 years, we have put down only a couple of applications of corn gluten and a couple of chicken manure. And it worked for the last couple of years - the lawn looked beautiful.

Last summer, however, we experienced a drought, and here's where I think we went wrong. First, in order to conserve water, we watered only minimally. This produced the right conditions (dry lawn with bare patches) for weeds to grow. Second, we didn't follow the organic lawn program, so the weeds pretty much made themselves at home.

So now I have called in the Mounties - Mike at Mike's Tree Surgeons - and we are doing an intervention. He will need to use chemicals to restore the lawn up through next summer, and then we'll go on his organic program and see if we have better results. He also told us to water more frequently through August to build the lawn back up again. The majority of these weeds are in the front lawn, so he also suggested we put a tree in and develop a garden bed, so as to shade the lawn and minimize space we'll have to use chemicals. We'll put one in this fall.

I'm writing this because I think it's important that people realize that some things will work and some may not. Please remember that I'm not suggesting that an organic lawn care program won't work, but I can assure you that benign neglect will not be your answer.