Lawn Care 101

We purposely picked a lot to build our house on so that we'd have a big yard - and we got what we wanted. Along with that, we have learned how much time and energy goes into a big yard. We don't have much to "tend" yet, it really is just keeping the grass healthy and green and pulling the weeds from the flower beds in the front yard. And, the grass we have here is Bermuda grass. Look it up in any book and it is classified as a big weed, so it shouldn't be too hard to keep alive, right? Well...hours and hours of work and hundreds of dollars (literally) spent in chemicals and fertilizer here is a picture of the result:
Not so good right? A few weeks ago Brandon started coming home and noticing how are yard just kept dying, and it has continued to get worse and worse. It is even more weird because there are spots that are green and lush too. We've adjusted the watering, which we already knew we were watering enough, we took pictures and took them to a professional landscape company to help us "diagnose" the problem but it has all been to no avail. When the last dose of fertilizer didn't work we knew there was something else going on. The last possibility we've determined is lawn fungus. Sounds gross huh?

The solution we've come up with is cornmeal. Last night after the kids were in bed we took 30 pounds of cornmeal out and threw it all over part of the yard. We are experimenting. Supposedly the cornmeal nuetralizes the fungus in the grass and fertilizes at the same time. It is an organic product used on lawns. I've done more reading on organic lawn care, and if this works we will be switching to an all organic lawn maintenace program. We are using the picture above as our "before" and we'll update in a couple of weeks on how it is progressing.

Another plus for the organic stuff - it is much cheaper and in theory it should cut down on bugs inside our house. The chemicals we put on the lawn not only rid the lawn of weeds, but they also kill all the insects. Things like spiders have no choice but to look for their food somewhere else, like inside my house. No thanks! Hopefully we'll notice a change in the bugs too. The next step for us if the cornmeal works is to load the lawn full of sugar. Apparently that keeps the weeds from germinating and kills weeds that are already exisiting. And - because the grass here gets brown during the colder months we can put rice seed all over the lawn and it will grow green during the winter.

We are pretty excited if this works! Can't you just picture a FHE years down the road of our family in the backyard in a cornmeal fight? How fun would that be? And the mess would be good for the yard!