by Randy Greene
The title of the article is what we hear all the time from customers who are just tired and fed up with what is going on with their lawns. This comment can come from customers who have twenty-year-old lawns or lawns that are just a couple of years old. When you have spent countless hours and hundreds of dollars and the lawn continues to look worse than it did last year, many tend to get angry and give up.
A dark green carpet-like lawn is ideal and increases the value of your home. It’s more comfortable to enjoy with the family and it adds a cooler, pleasant environment around the house during the heat of the summer. Even thought there are different types of lawn landscaping choices, the vast majority of people are after a thick healthy lawn which covers 40-70% of the ground around their homes.
Why are a good portion of people having trouble with creating and managing a thick healthy lawn? For about the last three generations it has been drilled into the heads of consumers that to have a carpet-like lawn you “must” use certain products to do it. This is the way many of the step “chemical fertilizers” programs work; feeding the lawn regardless of what the soil quality is. When the soils we have in the St. Louis area are treated with chemical fertilizers it will make your soil worse over time.
A biological method of lawn care is a mind set of what is happening in the system of the lawn, how is the plant doing, how is the soil doing and making them work together. In many areas around the country you will have “conditions” that are favorable to turf grasses and certain types of plants. But not all areas are favorable and the majority of the St Louis area is not really favorable to turf grasses. They will grow but they struggle and they continue to become defeated by the stress points that the region brings to bear.
If you work on eliminating a few of the stress points the lawn can survive the others. When you are working towards managing your lawn in a biological mind set you will always start with the dirt. Test your soil; you can not eliminate the stress of bad soil with out a soil test. Correcting your soils deficiencies is one of the best ways to eliminate several stress points and will benefit your lawn long term more then any other change.
A soil test also tells you what your lawn is missing so you can get very quick results by adding what is needed right now. Then the choices of products you use may be a mix chemical and “clean” but you are making them based on the needs of the soil so it helps the grass to grow in a sustainable way instead of making the soil worse over time.
For more information contact Randy Greene at Greene’s Country Store and Feed, 636-561-6637 or visit the store at 8621 Hwy N, Lake St. Louis, MO 63367. www.greenescountrystore.com.
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