Saturday, August 18, 2007

My sad, sad lawn

The garden has done pretty well this year, but I'm not so good at keeping up the lawn. It gets too tall, then I cut back too much and harm the grass. Also, it's mostly crabgrass, weeds, and grassburs.

I finally decided to start working on the grassburs, since I'll have little people with tender skin walking around the yard next year. I used a combination of a hoe, Roundup weed killer, and fire to clear out a pretty big patch (roughly 35 feet by 25 feet) that was about 80% burs, with some random weeds just to make it ugly.

I planted the area with a new variety of buffalo grass called "turffalo," which promises to be a dark green lawn that requires half the water and half the mowing of a regular lawn. I've got high hopes for it, since I rarely water and mow about half as often as I should.

The recommendation for planting this grass is to put in plugs (which are about the size of my thumb) 12" apart.

Here is a closeup of one plug:


I would have needed to buy three or four flats of grass to cover my patch at that density, at $50 per flat. Doing that would have provided me with a nice lawn in about a month.

I went the cheap route, buying one flat and planting the plugs between 30" and 36" apart.
Here is my "lawn" now:


The orange thing is a five-gallon bucket, for scale. There is grass in that bare patch, if you look hard enough.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Keep that hoe handy and baby your grass. You'll have a nice lawn one of these days.