What is lawn aeration and why is it so vital to lawn care? Learn more on the best time to aerate lawn. Also, learn how to aerate your lawn followed by overseeding.
Growing clover lawns has many benefits including nitrogen fixing, water conservation and food for pollinators. Learn about how clover can make a great cover crop for your gardens. Little by little we go is a journey of small steps getting back to the land and learning how to be self sustainable
Many of us have a love-hate relationship with our lawns. Although we enjoy the cool carpet of green grass to lie on and play on in summer, no one wants to spend hours every weekend mowing and trimming—not to mention battling weeds, insects, and fungus, and aerating, feeding, watering, and seeding. Turf lawns take a lot of time and money to maintain. They require the use of precious water resources to keep them alive, and the pesticides and herbicides we apply to them can damage the environment. More and more, people are turning to low-maintenance, no-mow lawn alternatives like meadows, rock gardens, and ground covers. These fresh options prove that you can have a beautiful yard without growing a single blade of grass. If that sounds right up your alley, check out these 10 no-mow alternatives to a grass lawn.
Read through the best height to mow your lawn based on the time of year and the type of grass you have.
A brick edge can be the perfect thing for a formal lawn. We explain how to create one.
Clover can be one of the hardest lawn weeds to control. But with the right strategy, and products, you can kill clover and prevent it from coming back.
While most people wax poetic about the smell of freshly cut grass, there are few out there who actually enjoy the task of cutting it. That’s why the
Grass alternatives can save you time and money while protecting the planet. Find out why you might want to consider some of these alternatives to a traditional grass lawn. How much time have you spent
Your destination for plant care tips, DIY home decor, and more. Get inspired to create. xoxo, jackie.
Fescues are rapidly becoming one of the best choices for a lawn. Their drought and heat tolerance put them on par with like Kentucky bluegrass.
Are you looking for tips on how to revive a dying lawn? Is your lawn dead? This lawn care guide has tips on how to bring back dead grass
One of the biggest benefits of a Thyme lawn is that it is low-maintenance. You don’t have to mow it and from mid-May to mid-June the Thyme is in full bloom.
Here's everything you need to know before converting to the trend.
Dichondra Repens Also known as: Kidney Weed, Dichondra Pony Foot, or Lawn Leaf This is one of our favorite versatile fun plants! Dichondra is now used in many ground cover situations where normal grasses may not do as well. It grows very close to the ground, (usually not over 2 inches tall) with a creeping growth habit. It has a bright green color, establishes a thick dense carpet look, and a very good soft feel underfoot. When used in lawn situations it can be mowed for an even, smooth finish but should not need it. It will cascade about 3 feet from your baskets, window boxes, or other containers, but it will also form a nicely domed shape that fills any available space, or crack beautifully! And to top it all off, it is a popular ingredient in Traditional Chinese Medicine blends. Diuretic, febrifuge and styptic. The whole plant is used for treating diarrhea. It is a fast growing perennial in warmer climates and a annual in frost heavy zones. It is also highly resistant to diseases and will grow in partial shade to full sun. The seed we offer is coated with a clay coating to make the seed easier to spread as well as help the seed retain water which aids in germination. The first leaves after germination will be long and narrow and will not look like dichondra in the beginning. Sow much like normal grass seed. USDA Zones: 8 - 11 This offer is for 3g (500+), 6g (1000+), or 12g (2000+) seeds.
This spring we decided to dethatch the lawn. Thatch is the build-up of dead grass within the lawn. It doesn’t allow air and water to get to the roots and just makes the lawn look ugly. We’ve lived in the house 9 years and have never dethatched before. Our first year, the lawn was in pretty bad shape. We did our best on our own, but then had to get a lawn service to really get it back in shape. Over the years I’ve had plenty of neighbors stop by and say how nice our lawn is. But this past winter was particularly hard on our lawn and we had a lot of thatch and patches of dead grass all over. We rented a Power Rake from our local rental store and with a $5 coupon we got it for $27 (tax included) for 2 hours. It takes just a little longer than mowing your grass, so 2 hours was plenty of time for us. The first thing you have to do is cut the grass at least once. Raise the tines of the Power Rake all the way up, then try it out and drop it down as needed so it is only raking up the thatch, and not all the grass and dirt too. We had ours almost all the way up and it was perfect for our lawn. This thing isn’t self-propelled like the lawn mower, so Jamie did the dethatching. The first pass was amazing and almost embarrassing! Look at all that thatch! Next up is getting rid of all the thatch. You could rake it all up, but talk about getting a blister! So I attached the collector bag to our lawn mower, set it up all the way and used the mower like a vacuum. It worked great, but I could only do one pass before the bag was full and I had to dump it out. Like my use of safety glasses?!? It was windy and thatch in my eyes was not pleasant. After all the thatch was removed the grass looked a bit dull and there were some really bad patches where we had to re-seed the lawn. I re-seeded a few years ago with some good results so I used the same formula this time. You’ll need topsoil (cheap stuff is fine, I picked mine up for $1/bag), MiracleGro garden soil, peat moss, and grass seed (7lb bag was just enough to patch our lawn). I mixed one bag of topsoil, 1/4 of the MircleGro soil, 1/8 of the peat moss and 1/4 of the seed in a wheelbarrow. I had to repeat this 3 times to cover all the patches in our lawn. First break up the soil a bit where you want to re-seed (I used a small hand rake) and then put down the soil/seed mix. After you have all your areas filled in cover them with a thin layer of peat moss. This will help keep the area moist and keep birds from eating the seed. Gently water the areas and keep watering every day until grass is starting to establish. It’s been three weeks and our lawn is looking better than ever. We do still use a lawn service and I made sure to let them know we were dethatching before they treated for the first time. The areas we patched are filling in nicely, although not entirely yet. If you are wondering what we did with all our bags of thatch, I have a co-worker that has a lot of land and she took it home for her compost. I highly recommend finding someone to take it for compost, because it won’t ever decompose in a landfill.
Forward planning and an ongoing wildflower management programme is critical for success. Follow our step-by-step guide for the best results.
by Shelly Sargent It's been a while since we posted here on the blog, and we really do apologise. It's been a hectic early summer for all of us thus far and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon! When casting about for blog topics, I wanted to keep things seasonal, and realised that all I had to do was look outside my window to find a great topic! Remember this spring - when we were over run by a sea of dandilions? If course, all of us greenies are thoroughly delighted that Ontario has banned pesticides and herbicides. But though this is good news for organic gardeners and great for the environment, it does means that the green manicured lawns of the past are much more difficult (and expensive) to maintain. This is particularly true for those of us who live on larger lots or rural properties with large areas of lawn. Since xeriscaping (removing lawn and replacing it with drought tolerant plantings and mulch, etc.) didn't seem to be the perfect fit for our situation like it was for some of my friends, I decided to look at other solutions. Now I am a hap-hazard lawn doctor at best: I've never been consistent with fertilizer, and have always hated chemicals (even before it was cool to hate them) - refusing to use them. When we lived in the city, this always meant we'd have a few weeds, but neighbours who sprayed usually kept the weed population at bay. Once we moved to a larger rural property in Caledon, I realized I'd have to get serious about weed management. A few years ago, I was talking to a neighbour about the encroachment of dandilions and other lawn weeds. This gentleman is one of those people who seems to know a bit about everything and he suggested that I over-seed the larger areas of my lawn with white dutch clover, noting that it is a low growing, mannerly plant that spreads well, and discourages many of the undesireables. It mows like grass, mingles politely with existing grass and looks and smells wonderful in the blooming season. I liked the idea, particularly when I realized that the bees would also love the clover. Since I knew that bees are the primary source for pollination in any garden and that they need all the support mankind can give them to help bring them back, I figured this could be my small way to help out. So off I went to the local farm supply, told him what I was doing and why and came home with a bag of clover seed. In retrospect, I likely should have read up on how to sow the seed and when, but I just hand-broadcast the seed onto our lower lawn in mid-June and sat back to see what would happen. Truthfully, in the first year, we had a few patches of clover - which looked a bit messy - and that's about it. It is now the third summer since we over-seeded, and I'm now truly starting to see why a clover lawn is a great thing. Not only is a clover lawn easy to care for, since it doesn't grow as tall as grass (less mowing), but it is also a natural food for my lawn. Apparently clover used to be a fairly standard addition to most grass seed mixtures because it grew well where soil conditions wouldn't support grass alone. A little online research has also determined that clover (which is a legume, by the way) stores atmospheric nitrogen in little white "nodules" on its roots. When annual clover dies, that nitrogen is released as natural plant food - hey presto: it automatically nourishes your lawn! Nifty! I like anything that saves me a step! The other day, my dad and I sat on lawn chairs in a sea of white clover, breathing in that sweet, clean smell of clover in bloom and watching the bees busily going about their work amongst the pretty little white flowers, and I realized that all things considered, I'm very happy with my clover/grass lawn. It is very much a work in progress, and I'm still learning how to care for and maintain it. But I really like the way things are heading! Easy to care for, anti-chemical, supports bees and pollination, resilient and attractive (even with a bunch of kids and a dog running all over it)... to me, clover is the perfect lawn!
How much grass should you cut when you mow? How frequently should you change the filters? You might be doing these things wrong...
Don't give up on your lawn until you try these remedies
Lush green lawns have long been the anchor of outdoor landscaping. However, with today's focus on protecting our natural resources (and reducing maintenance), many homeowners are choosing alternatives to grass lawns.
If you live in a climate warm enough to make an olive tree happy, consider your landscape dilemma solved. One olive tree, dramatically situated, is all it
The patented Scag® Tiger Striper Lawn Striping System allows turning the striping on & off, and remove the entire roller system without tools.
Do you aerate your lawn? I recently started looking into ways of making my lawn more lush and healthy and what I learned is that aerating your lawn if really good for it. Aeration helps
