GRRR! Neighbor conduct or maybe I'm wrong about that

[s1mpl3k1d]

I saw 2 neighbors(different dates) walking with their dogs last week and it peed on my 5 month old lawn. I've started noticing it turned yellow on the 3rd day. Today, I think it's dead! Crap! Sigh! 🤬How can we prevent this? Everytime I see it, it makes me mad especially I can see it from my office room, sigh

[oze]

If you catch them in the act, quickly run out with a container of water and flush the **** out of the spot on which the dog peed. Not only will you dilute the pee, but you'll send a passive-aggressive message to the owner.

[MorpheusPA]

Agreed. If you put sugar in the water, that will also help. The sugar will spark massive bacterial growth, which will use the nitrogen in the urea as its nitrogen source.

(Bacteria require carbon and nitrogen in about a 9 to 1 ratio, with sugar as both energy and carbon. 1 Tbsp per quart will seriously help out with stopping a burn).

Over the longer-term, feeding organically stops burning from doggie pee except in the driest conditions, but it does take some (years) time for the carbon levels to build and bacterial levels to rise enough to deal with it. On this lawn, and two to five dogs depending on who's over, the only time I see the occasional burn is in July and August and only if it's been very dry.

[oze]

Adding sugar to the water is genius!

[MorpheusPA]

Just a bit of Creative Biochemistry. A tiny handful scattered atop the pee and then watered in will also work very well if you'd rather not mix it up.

[s1mpl3k1d]

WOW! Thank you so much for the tip! I think it's similar to the one I was doing at my old house using blackstrap molasses. I did it long time ago but I wasn't sure what it was for and wasn't sure what it will do to our lawns

[MorpheusPA]

Blackstrap (or, really, any other molasses or corn syrup) will also work as a sugar substitute if you'd rather. But there you'll need to dilute in water.

Blackstrap molasses actually contains a lot of other elements that can be useful for grass, bacterial and other micro growth. Most notably, sulfur and iron. You can get unsulfured blackstrap as well if you wish, in which case sulfur levels will be lower--but not zero. There's minor amounts of calcium, magnesium, potassium, manganese, and plenty of other elements in there as well.

No, not enough to shift a soil test or bork your soil pH, but enough to encourage bacterial growth if they should happen to be locally short. The heavy-hitter is still sugar.

Really, any natural or semi-natural sugar source is fine. Corn syrup way out of date or a bit cloudy? Reserve it for dog spots and use a tablespoon per quart of water.

I know somebody's going to ask--you shouldn't get ants. It's too dilute. And poured on an anthill, quite the opposite. They hate it, it causes uncontrolled bacterial and fungal growth in their tunnels. Although there, I'd step up the sugar quite a bit...

[Green]

Morph,

Any concern (the equivalent of soil-diabetes?) using too much sugar? In other words, favoring certain bacteria or fungi that like to consume sugar, and then throwing off the microherd balance?

[MorpheusPA]

Yes, absolutely, but only very temporary Type 2 in the sense that once the sugar is washed out or used up, the balance will go back to normal, bacterial populations will crash (many spore up and wait for better days), the soil goes on an insta-diet and everything improves. Your soil won't experience permanent issues the way a human being will with constant dietary abuse.

So this is not something I'd generally recommend as a wide casting over the entire lawn as a common habit. Although if you wanted to do it once to spark the microherd, I wouldn't say you couldn't or shouldn't. I would say you'd probably get more bang for the buck from applying corn meal or cracked corn, which contains plenty of complex carbohydrates that bacteria and helpful fungi will happily consume. And you'll get long-lasting organic matter besides, which sugar won't give you (although the resulting bacterial mass will).

Everybody likes sugar, bacteria, fungi...you'll simply favor those where the current environment is good. If that should happen to be a disease, well, that might not be a wonderful idea. But for a dog urine spot, it's going to be nitrogen-absorbing bacteria if watered in (which you'd do for a dog spot). And it's only one tiny spot anyway.

The same thing happens during the post-burn phase of the lawn when the dog pees; urea-consuming bacteria go wild (there are tons of species that excrete urease), nitrogen gets released, populations expand (just not fast enough to help due to not having an energy and carbon source to match the nitrogen), the grass burns as it competes for nitrogen and sucks it up as fast as the bacteria do, and the bacterial populations later stop expanding, and contract again as the nitrogen sources disappear.

Boom-bust ecologies are pretty common in microherds. It's why I'm recommending "small" handfuls and 1 Tbsp amounts in small areas. Adding gigantic amounts would cause issues. Bacterial expansion would use up oxygen in the soil (most of these species are aerobic), causing other problems, including loss of oxygen, rapid declines in populations, anaerobic decay, dead grass, stinking soils... It'll reverse, but let's not set off the problem in the first place. It would, however, be tough to set off. I've used sugar in the compost bin, and experimentally on soils in summer when I had heat on my side, and had little luck with clogging a soil. And I have a pretty heavy silt soil. In the bin, it merely rocketed temperatures to 170 in a few hours, then sterilized the core until it relit as temperatures dropped again.

As a sidenote, you can get the same kind of issues with overapplication of high-protein organics. They'll smell pretty bad when decaying due to the nitrogen compounds entering the air, but it reverses fast. Lower protein ones are harder to overdo, like corn, where a hundred pounds per thousand square feet really doesn't generate any smell at all. And a few surprise you, like alfalfa, which when mildly overapplied smells like death on a pogo stick.

Was that a little disjointed? It felt a little disjointed to me, so hopefully you got the point.

[MorpheusPA]

Oh, this is not to take away from the initial point of dilute, dilute, dilute when it comes to dog pee.

I mean, sugar is nice. It's a great idea, sure. But when all else fails? Water does the trick.

Oze takes the prize for that suggestion. Dilute it by 5 to 1 and you probably won't get a burn. 10 to 1 and it won't burn even from a female dog (who tends to get it all in one spot) even during a dry summer.