Three Lawn Care Teams

[tlicious1020]

I am a lawn care rookie of a year. I left Texas for California because my wife of 2 years works for the state of California. We married a year before I retired from the Air Force. The lawn at her house was riddled with weeds. She hired someone to "mow and blow" the lawn weekly.

I requested for the the guy to give me a great lawn. Paid a little more monthly and I didn't notice a difference after 2 months. So I cut him loose. Aerated and overseeded with Scott's TTTF. A beautiful lawn emerged.

I hired a neighbor with a lawn care business. I quickly learned he didn't know a great deal about TTTF as my lawn care knowledge heightened. He was a bad listener overall and had no clue what type of grass mix I had in my lawn. I would ask him not to mow seedlings in an area. Brow would just mow them down. I'm like you can't identify grass seedlings that I pointed out to you?

I hired lawn care service number three. The owner seemed knowledgeable. He could immediately identify the grass types in my lawn and the 4 different types of flowers in my garden area..I started noticing a few things though. Like I requested a list of products he uses on lawns like fertilizer and pre emergent. Never received that information. So I told him I'll do it myself. After aerating and overseeding in October, Stover Seed company recommended using a specific fertilizer. I wanted to use Dimension pre emergent and start applying it in February. My lawn care guy never told me what pre emergent he uses and he likes to start applying it in January. The Stover Seed company said to start in February. They're located in southern California.

Should I keep lawn care service #3 around? I was paying $80 to the first guy, $120 to the second, and $160 to the current guy a month. I'm basically paying $160 for mow and blow when I do everything else myself.

[turf_toes]

No one will do a better job than you can yourself.

Most of the LCOs I’ve met know less than I do too.

[Wally]

Just ask them what cultivars performed best for your area in the NTEP? They will look at you as if you were speaking to them in Latin! lol

[ndlutz]

I am going to give you a slightly different opinion on this and I don't expect it to be popular here.

First and foremost, I agree that nobody will do it better than you if you do it. The question is -will you do it consistently? If you miss applications, get bored, or otherwise don't take care of business on a consistent basis you will have been better off hiring somebody to do it. In my opinion, for things like weed control, consistency is more important than specific knowledge. You can hop in and take care of the major/sensitive stuff.

This is all based on my personal experience. I treated lawn care like a hobby when I first came to this site and loved it. Life got in the way and eventually my beautiful lawn turned ugly. I can't even tell you how many one time triclopyr apps I did knowing that it would require two to be effective. I just never got to the second one. My lawn suffered because of it.

I begrudgingly hired a local company to do weed control and fert for me and although I don't think they know as much about lawn care as I do, they do it when they say they will. My lawn thanks me.

I know that this forum is for people who treat this as a hobby so you are going to get a lot of responses to do it yourself. Like I said - I don't disagree, however, I think you need to search yourself and see what you really want. Someday I may take control again but for now I enjoy mowing a heck of a lot more because I'm not worried about doing the apps myself.

[MorpheusPA]

It does depend on where you ask the question. As you asked it here--yes, most of us will answer that your own care will surpass any company. Because ours does; we get our soil tests, inspect our lawns, spray our weeds, and so on. I'm down to fiddling in parts per billion on manganese and selenium.

If one has no intention of being that exacting and just wants it done, a reliable company can do that. Just make sure they're reliable--most big name ones are not.