How do you care for your lawn?

[dennis thompson]

I usually just use Scott’s 4 bag system,I’m just wondering how others here might care for their lawns?

[Larry Frank]

So much depends on where you are!!! My yard is Blue Grass, Fescue, and perennial rye. My yard is almost 2 acres with areas of sun and shade and use different blends of grass in different areas.

The price of fertilizer has gone way up. I compared the price of me doing the fertilizing versus having someone do it. I ended up having someone do it 4 times a year.

I have a well and water some parts of the yard but others I will let go dormant in the summer.

[George Bokros]

I compared the cost of me doing it four times per year with the cost of having it done. My service does it FIVE times per year for what it was costing me for FOUR times. My lawn is green all growing season. They use granular fertilizer which is superior to liquid spray fertilizer because it lasts longer.

[roger wiegand]

Ours is just about gone, replaced with low growing, low maintenance native plants. The critters are much happier as a result, we have booming numbers of fireflies and butterflies as well as myriad native bees again. Water bill has dropped precipitously and we're not adding all that crap to the runoff into our river, which helps the fishing. Mowing once a year is a pleasure. Abandoning the wealthy European style lawns for a more natural landscape with American plants is a real win-win situation.
The remaining lawn is liberally seeded with white clover to provide nitrogen as well as small flowering plants to provide some color. The clover stays green even when the European grasses have turned brown for the summer; it all seems quite happy with no additional inputs in terms of fertilizer, water, and pesticides.

[Dave Fritz]

We love in the country and just mow whatever grows. I'm thinking of renting a roller however to use in spring to knock down all the mole runs as well as mouse runs to level things a bit. Farmers around us add enough chemicals to the soil.

[Stan Calow]

Hats off to you, Roger. I would be tarred and feathered by my neighbors if I did anything unconventional with my lawn.
I had a service treat it for last few years, and it looks good - when it rains. Thats the problem, water being the most critical chemical for a good lawn. I refuse to install a wasteful irrigation system, which is almost mandatory to have a green lawn all summer.
I am going back to DIY with the four bag system although using store brand fertilizer (it's the same stuff) for half the price of the name brands. Even though the local gardening experts say fertilizer only once or twice (in September) is sufficient.

Two quotes from HGTV (when it was about homeowners maintaining a home, not house flippers):
- Think of your lawn as a meadow - accept diversity
- I dont like to kill weeds, they're often the only green I see.

[Jack Frederick]

On our foothill property we mow from mid-March until about the first week of June. then the lawn dies back until the Nov/Dec rains. I mow really just to keep the foxtails down as our sweet dog just absorbs them. The green photo is from May 4th. The other is June 19th the same year. Flash fried! All my neighbors have 2500 gallon storage tanks for their water as the wells are so poor. for the sale of the property we pumps our well at 15 gpm for three hours and could not run it dry, but for lawn, well, you just don’t push the well.

[Jim Becker]

I mow it when it needs it. We do not use chemicals, fertilizers or anything else on the lawn.

[glenn bradley]

I removed it when I realized how much I spent to grow it, water it, mow it, and haul off the waste. In some parts of the country lawns are unnatural and we get to do things like desert landscapes and so forth.

[Jamie Buxton]

Lawn? Nope. My yard is native trees and shrubs, which are adapted to California's weather pattern. I weed-wack once a year in early summer.

[Brian Elfert]

I mow the grass when I get around to it. No fertilizer, chemicals, or irrigation. Two acres of grass is too expensive to do any of the three.

The house was a foreclosure and the bank was saving money by not mowing close to an acre. I have never mowed that section either. It would be a lot of work at this point after eight years to bring that section back to lawn. It would also add more time to each mowing and not add any value.

[Tom M King]

We have about ten acres of grass to keep cut short. It's all warm season Bermuda or Centipede. It goes dormant in cold weather, and turns brown, but is nice and lush from Spring through Fall. I just cut it. If it doesn't get enough rain to grow, it just waits. No fertilizer or irrigation.

Our Pastures are about the same-mostly Bermuda. The horses normally graze from Easter until Thanksgiving, and then eat hay. This year they only ate 9 bales of hay each from just before Christmas to a couple of weeks ago, and have turned their noses up to hay now. While a lot of the country got cold extreme, we'd had the opposite.

Pasture picture is from last week. Shoreline a couple of years ago before I rebuilt that dock.

[Myk Rian]

I put down crabgrass control as soon as the snow is gone. Then pretty much leave it alone after that.

[Brian Elfert]

I removed it when I realized how much I spent to grow it, water it, mow it, and haul off the waste. In some parts of the country lawns are unnatural and we get to do things like desert landscapes and so forth.

I would do a rock lawn if it wouldn't just fill up with weeds here.

[Zachary Hoyt]

I have a push reel mower and try to remember to mow the lawn before it gets too tall. At our former location it took me about 2 hours to mow, here it's only about 15 minutes.