I'd like to tag onto my previous post. I was extremely stressed back in October, so here's a little more info. Here is a link to an article about the microbes which live on the outside surfaces of plants. This area is referred to as the phyllosphere. The article describes the microbes (bacteria, yea...

Since I moved away from my treed community in the city to the country, where the trees are all elsewhere, collecting OM has been limited to banana peels and old salad. Sometimes we'll stop in the old neighborhood and pick up as many bags of leaves as we can fit in the car. We also have a very cooper...

You'll have to do a little phone work to find availability and price, but HERE'S A MAP AND LIST of feed stores near you.

I'm so glad I posted this many years ago. But, now, since I've slept so many times since then, I have a question for Crabgrass. I think I need more explanation about the following commented text. :: Parse all items, tokenized by blank space delimiters, :: one file at a time for all files with ".001"...

Ladycage, the shampoo will not affect the grass. Almost nothing affects bermuda.

Keep the name of that landscaping contractor handy so you don't accidentally use him again. Tilling also brings up microbes from deep in the soil and deposits them all through the soil. Same for microbes which live at the surface. The microbes will recover soon enough, but why not just leave them al...

My wife goes crazy with alfalfa pellets on her veggies and flowers. I told her to use a heaping handful for each plant once a month. She uses about a quart per plant twice per season. It's solid coverage across the entire bed. We also compost anything that isn't woody. We have a source for horse dun...

One of my neighbors, the 83 year old lady, got into a confrontation with a neighbor about his leaves. There was a creek between his yard and hers, which was owned by the city. She was always trying to get something growing on the banks of the creek. One day she noticed the neighbor's yard guy leavin...

Why not keep the clover? It's a kids area, not a museum grounds. When I was little all lawns had clover. What I remember is that clover stained our jeans and our mothers got angry about that. Nowadays we have cleaning products like Oxyclean which takes out those stains. Grass does not stain like clo...

Nitrogen may eventually be "nitrogen" but with alfalfa it takes 3 weeks. And by "nitrogen" I mean the type of chemical nitrogen exchanged by the roots, not the gas. The nitrogen in alfalfa is in the form of protein (amino acids) which take some time to decompose to the form taken by the roots. You h...

It's ironic, the only reason there's a CG problem is because I held off on the 2nd split app of prodiamine, worried it could interfere with seeding. Now I'm in the same spot, different chemical.. More likely the main reason you have a crabgrass problem is watering too frequently this past April and...

Too bad I really didn’t even have any weeds! :) So you think the Bermuda will still survive? I have now set my sprinkler system up to water for 25 mins four times a day to see if I can flush it out. Any risk over overwatering and further damaging the grass? How long do you think I should do this? A...

Looks like heat stress. You might want to recheck your sprinkler timing to get 1 inch. If all seems fine with that, you might want to try watering every 5 days instead of every 7.

Corn meal is the only organic approach found to handle disease in St Augustine. The corn meal would sub for the alfalfa, but it is not quite as potent as alfalfa pellets, so you might need to apply the alfalfa a little sooner next time. Your grass should be cleared up by now if you applied the corn ...

Have you tried spraying with Weed-b-Gon? I'm not sure if wbg is safe for zoysia, so read the label.

I tried it at 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet, every month for an entire lawn season and saw no appreciable change in weed pressure. I did; however, have the most beautiful lawn I've ever had.

Now that you have the hang of it, find the new low spots and fill again to perfect the profile. Mowing at the lowest setting without scalping is an achievable goal.

Baby shampoo is done INSTEAD of the BLSC, not as an ingredient. If you have a small area or don't need a lifetime supply of BLSC, give baby shampoo a try and see what it does for you.

San Dimas! Cool!! I went to college over the hill from you, so I know the climate. Strongly agree with HoosierLG. As you suspected, you are overwatering, and yes, there is a disease present. The grass type could be a fescuy weed mix. What you should have in the inland area there is either bermuda or...

In general zoysia is not shade tolerant; however, there are some varieties which are very shade tolerant. One, which is no longer available, was called Shadow Turf. If you find references to that on the Interwebs, it is no longer available. It was a hybrid of the Manila type of zoysia (not the japon...