Just bought a new house, and I need to completely redo the lawn. It was a rental for two years and no one took care of the lawn. It literally is a lawn full of weeds. I was wondering if any of you had some suggestions on products I should buy to kill the weeds, before I reseed the lawn. I know it has a ton of clovers, but I'm not sure what other types of weeds are growing, not sure if that matters.
I'm on a budget so I won't be getting a professional lawn care service to do it.
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The Scots cycle of stuff works well for me. I Do that in addition to religous watering, cutting and edging. The weed and feed knocked out a minor clover problem I has a couple of years ago.
Once the grass has a chance to get healthy you'll find that it chokes out a lot of the weeds.
Even though by August I'll be using one I don't really like the typical lawn cutting service. It seems like they all want to cut it real short. I've always been of the opinion that St. Augustine likes to be thicker.
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Buy roundup concentrate and spread over your entire lawn using a garden sprayer. Wait the prescribed number of days before seeding per the Roundup container (I think its 7-14 days).
Have some topsoil delivered to your house (they usually dump it in your driveway) and spread it around the re-seed area. Then spread your seed using a spreader (for even coverage). Buy a few bails of straw and spread over the top.
Water like hell for the next two weeks. (Really, you have to keep it moist in this hot weather).
You should have some great looking grass in a month.
I've followed the Scotts plan from their website. So far it's worked really well. Get a good spreader, a nice mower and a sturdy string trimmer (Echo SRM210 is great). I picked up a used edger, which helps - it's messy but it really makes the walks look nicer.
I'd probably seed in the fall vs now unless you have some patches that need to fill in.
i'm going to go with the others and say the scott's cycle is great. i've got my house on the market now to sell so when i took this pictures, it was a few weeks after i put the first cycle down (and totally redid the lanscaping) and man, did it look great:
If you plan to plant seed, do not put down crabgrass preventer or weed n feed. They will make it harder to grow seed.
What you should do, is pull the big weeds, rough up the soil and put down seed and starter fertilizer. After four or five weeks of watering, then you should have some grass growing, and you could weed and feed then... The grass needs to be stronger first.
I'd suggest getting multiple types of grass seed and making sure one of them is the RTF seed.
nice house- i really like the bay window
too bad its not in my neighborhood- I'm in GR
jim
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I also like the Scotts 4 step fertilizer. But what you describe may need a rototiller and plenty of seed and water. Going that route is more labor intensive initially, but will pay dividends quicker. Otherwise it will take 2-3 years of work to get rid of all the weeds (trust me - I've been through it before).
as others have mentioned, try physical removal via pulling and/or rototilling the problem areas before resorting to chemicals. add some topsoil or compost to nurish the lawn. you're in a perfect situation to establish a new yard that is not chemical dependent. there are tons of websites out there to help you along the way.
weed-n-feed products and herbicides (Roundup, etc) are considered pesticides under US law. A few words about pesticides:
Quote:
The developing fetus, children, and adolescents are uniquely vulnerable to harmful effects from pesticide exposure. The National Cancer Institute reports that children are at risk for brain and other childhood cancers and are 6 times more likely to develop leukemia when lawn pesticides are used at home.
Many pesticides are classified as endocrine disruptors, substances that mimic, block, or interfere with reproductive and growth hormones. The full health effects of exposure to endocrine disruptors early in life are permanent and irreversible.
Pets are also at risk for pesticide exposure since they play and sleep on grass and sometimes ingest it.
Pesticide runoff pollutes ground and surface waters, which threatens the safety of our aquatic environments and drinking water supplies. Many lawn pesticides are highly toxic to aquatic organisms.
Many pesticides remain toxic longer than the recommended "24 hour" re-entry period.
Although all products are registered, the inert ingredients may be even more toxic than the active approved ingredient.
Healthy soil is the cornerstone to a successful organic lawn. Pesticides can kill beneficial microorganisms in the soil that are necessary to establish a healthy lawn.
Pesticides can be tracked indoors and residues can persist in household dust and carpets in the absence of sunlight and water.
(gets off soap box) Don't mean to sound preachy, but I'm involved in a grant to reduce pesticide use in the community i work for. pestides were detected in our water supply for the first time last year, so this has definitely sparked our interst. the information above is from a website we developed as part of the grant Healthy Lawns for Healthy Families, take a look for further information and other links.
Since you are in Alabama, you have a different situation than the people who live in more northern areas. When they suggest to reseed, that would only apply to bermudagrass in your area (for the most part) but that may not be what you currently have (or want to have). In northern climates, they can reseed their bluegrass or whatever they have. If you have/want St. Augustine, you can't reseed it and may have to/want to buy sod.
The first step would be to assess what's there now. If really have NOTHING, then it might be worth starting over and that would likely require spraying the area with Roundup AND tilling the site to start getting the weeds under control. However, tilling will only bring more weed seeds to the surface (they are present throughout the soil) so you won't be eliminating your weed problem. The comment about pre-emergent herbicides is correct in the context of reseeding a lawn because it will not differentiate between the turfgrass seeds and the weed seeds so not much of anything will come up. After you spray and till it all up, let it just sit for a couple of weeks and see what comes up later and then spray that again. If the site is not level, this is the time (after the first tilling and before you wait the two weeks) to level it either by raking out what's there or bringing in new soil. Keep in mind that bringing in new soil will also mean bringing in new weed seeds so the best product to use to avoid that is something that's got lots of composted organic matter added to it and has been sitting in a pile to "cook" which helps to reduce the germination potential of the weed seeds. The "topsoil" that's commonly sold is typically crap - you get what you pay for (caveat emptor) - and layering a completely different soil texture on top can cause a new set of problems. I would by a specialty mixed product for this purpose and till it in lightly to prevent a layer; it's not that expensive and well worth it. I don't know who you could call in your area for this but check with the nurseries. This will give you a better starting point to establish your lawn. Roundup is one of the safest herbicides around but it's non-selective meaning that it will kill ALL plants that it come in contact with the LEAVES (not woody parts), not just the weeds, so don't use it unless you are trying to start over.
Once you gotten the weed problem under control and the site leveled out, decide what you want to go back in with. You could sod a number of species (St. Augustine, bermuda, zoyia, possibly centipede (depends on pH and soil), paspalum and others). In the south, the only species that you probably can seed, in most cases (are you in the north or south part of the state?), is bermudagrass. This would be the cheapest but bermudagrass is THE #1 weed in the world so don't do it unless the area is separate from other plantings or unless you are willing to spend a lot of time pulling it out of beds. You can buy hulled seed, spread it around, keep it constantly moist and it would be up in a couple of weeks since the temps are perfect right now. Or, you can sod.
If you have grass now but just have a lot of weeds, the best weed control for an existing lawn is frequent mowing. Most weeds (not all) can be controlled - I didn't say eradicated - with regular, close, consistent mowing. If you want to spray something on the weeds, you then need to know whether you have grassy or broadleaf weeds. The grassy ones are grasses and the other ones are basically everything else. Then, you would have to know what kind of grass you have before you can pick the right product to control the weeds. Some chemicals will work fine on one turf species but damage another one so there is no magic bullet.
In terms of "organic" approaches, there has been some work done with using vinegar as a post-emergent herbicide - http://www.moscowfood.coop/archive/V...illsWeeds.html - but I don't know how broad it's effectiveness is. Corn gluten has been used as a pre-emergent herbicide, too - http://www.gluten.iastate.edu/daily.html .
Both those links are just samples of the info... Google it if you want more.
Originally posted by Deserve: ..but I don't know enough about the organic stuff to offer anything past my own experience.
Since turfgrass management is one of the courses I teach at the university I work at, I always challenge my students to tell me WHY they believe that an "organic" approach is the best way to go. Unfortunately, most of them can't explain it beyond that just what they've always been told. Overall, I would rather they blindly follow that approach than the other end of the spectrum, i.e., having homeowners over-applying over-the-counter pesticides and fertilizers (also the source of a big water quality problem). The biggest problem, IMHO, is not the products themselves but how people use them... just like guns and other stuff.
My goal is to get my students to the point where they have an understanding of why you do what, when and WHY. There simply aren't "organic" solutions to every problem that can be helped with
the pesticides but, then again, I think many people over react to the problems they perceive. Many diseases go away on their own very quickly and DON'T NEED TO BE SPRAYED WITH SOMETHING. Same with insects and, as I said before, weeds if you mow frequently. Personally, I use very little in the way of pesticides either on my home landscape or on the 450+ acre campus I manange and they still look very good.
So, anyway, my only point in posting this was my concern with people accepting one approach or another based on what "they say" without trying to gain some kind of understanding of the problem and the possible solutions. Same thing applies to working out, investing, using medical services, etc. Of course, we can't know everything about everything but I agree with HR that this is one that's important enough for all of our sakes to learn enough to at least not be dangerous to yourself and the rest of us!
Originally posted by Q.:
[QB] The biggest problem, IMHO, is not the products themselves but how people use them... just like guns and other stuff.
that's the whole reason i chimed in with the "organic" option and pesticide warning. most homeowners blindly accept the "better living thru chemicals" mantra in the quest for the perfect yard. i did the same up until a year ago. unfortunately the application directions are rarely followed and extra product is spread following the "more is better" mindset and/or they don’t want to store the unused portion of the package. according to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, homeowners use 10x the amount of pesticides per acre than farmers. that is the main reason these chemicals are showing up in our lakes, rivers and water supplies (FYI-most conventional water treatment technologies can't remove pesticides from the water supply, so if it comes into a well or surface water intake, it's most likely gonna end up getting into your body )
i have no objection to the use of chemicals, assuming they are used sparingly and as directed. i just felt the underlying theme of this thread was that Charger should practically napalm the yard and start from scratch.
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