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             The Gardener Guy of Tulsa, Oklahoma

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Spring Lawn Care 2009

First, what exactly do you expect your lawn to be like? Folks my age grew up with Scott Foresman's Dick and Jane Readers, which defined what suburbia should look like: cute kids, floppy-eared dogs, and an expanse of perfect green lawn. Except we weren't all cute, and our lawns were full of dandelions and clover. Now days the chemical industry has defined a good lawn as one without clover or dandelions, despite the fact that the taproots of dandelions help penetrate and break up hard pan and improve drainage. And clover can fix nitrogen, taking unusable nitrogen from the air and changing it - with the aid of soil bacteria - into a form that can feed the grass.

The chemical industry that promotes "Weed-n-Feed" lawn products worked hard to convince us that clover is a weed. They did that because the herbicides that kill dandelions and other broad leafed weeds also kill clover. But the messages sent out in glossy magazines and TV ads make it clear: a lawn is a monoculture. Everything but grass is bad. I disagree.

I recently got a nice email from a reader in Kirby, Vermont, who wanted to know what to do about the "Creeping Charlie" or lawn ivy (Glechoma hederacea) that is taking over her lawn. I asked her to think outside the box. In part I wrote, "Please repeat after me: "If it's green and doesn't hurt bare feet and you can mow it, it's a LAWN!" Repeat as needed. Worry about thistles, which hurt feet, not Charlie! ...Unless you are prepared to nuke your lawn with herbicides, which you are not, you are stuck with it."

And, I continued, "Many people think dandelions are obnoxious, but I love them. I tell folks to think of them as daffodils that come back after mowing. Please let me know if you can get your mind around this, and live with Charlie. Think of him as a needy Uncle who lives with you and whom you can not throw out." I heard back, and Uncle Charlie will get to stay in the lawn.

Right now, my lawn does not look very good. There are large brown spots, but I know they will go away. And there are mounds of soil where moles have dug tunnels during the winter, leaving piles of nice top soil for me to harvest. Instead of trying to kill the moles, or even repel them (which my book, "Notes from the Garden", tells readers how to do), I thank the moles.

That's right, every spring the moles deliver to my lawn a few wheelbarrows full of delicious topsoil. All I have to do is take a rake and shovel and pick it up. Then I can use it wherever I need fill dirt, or use it to make raised beds, or mix some into the potting mix I make for my plants on the deck. Once the mole-diggings have been cleaned up, the moles don't bother me again until NEXT spring, when they kindly deliver more free soil. And since it doesn't seem to create any real problems in the lawn, I don't worry about it. (Maybe in 20 years my entire lawn will implode into a cavern of mole tunnels, but I don't worry about it - or not much.)

I have one section of lawn near an aging sugar maple that is in decline. Because the maple's roots are in the lawn, I do some soil improvement there most years - for the tree rather than the lawn. I spread compost over the lawn, just flinging it by shovel and spreading it out around with a lawn rake until half an inch of compost covers the lawn. The compost is mixed into the soil by the earthworms that love it.

And I generally spread some Pro-Gro (a bagged organic fertilizer) around the maple. It will add not only nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (which also come in a bag of chemical fertilizer), it will also add beneficial trace minerals. Among other things, Pro-Gro contains seaweed and ground oyster shells - ingredients from the sea that include trace minerals that have washed downstream and accumulated in them.

Organic fertilizer makes more sense for the lawn, despite the fact that it costs more: it is slow-release and its ingredients will not wash away in a rainy period, the way many chemical fertilizers do.

If I see clover and a variety of other Weeds growing in a lawn, I know it's an organic one. I might plunk myself down and look for a 4-leaf clover just for good luck. And maybe this year I'll make myself some organic dandelion wine - fresh from my lawn.

Henry Homeyer is a gardening coach and the author of 3 gardening books. You may reach him at P. O. Box 364, or henry.homeyer@comcast.net; his web site is www.Gardening-Guy.com