Summer is the season for building homes, and early autumn is the time for building lawns.
All through the land, thousands of families are moving into new houses, stepping along wobbly planks, walking around piles of earth, and wondering if the heaps of yellow clay surrounding their castles will ever be transformed into green, carpet-like lawns.
As the summer wanes, the housewife looks dismayed at the barren earth surrounding her new home.
If the sun shines, dust covers the immaculate newness of her cabinets, and if rain and snow come, she sees muddy tracks of small fry across the carpet.
“Hurry, hurry,” she urges the bedeviled contractor. “The lawn we must have now!”
A long winter of muddy tracks and perhaps another dust summer cannot be endured. Suddenly, the work is finished, and lawn-making time is at hand.
If a lawn is to be magnificent, its preparations cannot be slighted. A lawn is expected to be a thing of beauty forever, not a ragged foot mat kept barely alive by continual doctoring.
It is expected to endure the vagaries of hostile weather and periods of vacation-time neglect.
If a lawn is to live up to these great expectations, the soil must be prepared properly before the seeds are planted.
The Evils Of Poorly Prepared Soil
Indeed, building a lawn means preparing the seed bed. And remember that no amount of subsequent dabbling with sprinklers and fertilizers will completely overcome the evils of poorly prepared soil.
The secret to building a good lawn is thoroughly mixing lime, phosphate, and potash into the soil before seeding—after the rough grading is finished.
In areas where the soil is acid in reaction, agricultural lime should be added at the rate of 15 to 20 pounds per 100 square feet (150 to 200 pounds per 1,000 square feet).
The neighbors will wonder what is going on when they see so much lime spread on the soil.
Their advice should be listened to—but. only with neighborly politeness! Lime is not needed in areas where the soil is alkaline (mainly in semiarid climates).
Of course, the exact degree of acidity or alkalinity of soil cannot be known unless soil samples are sent to the local county agricultural agent, farm bureau, agricultural college, or a fertilizer distributor (any one of which will also determine your soil’s exact fertilizer requirements).
However, excess lime never injured a lawn. Even when 25% percent of the soil volume is pure lime, grasses and clovers thrive happily.
Grasses and clovers also require large amounts of phosphate to grow their best. SuperphosEihate (20% percent available phosphorous) should be added at 1,000 pounds per acre (2 1/2 pounds per 100 square feet, 25 pounds per 1,000 square feet).
Potash also must be added in many areas. The correct potash requirement is difficult to learn, but if 1 1/2 pounds of 50% percent potash per 100 square feet are added, no grass will complain of being starved for this plant food.
The Real Work Begins
The fertilizers must be disked deeply and thoroughly into the soil. Ideally, the disk should cut about 8” inches into the soil, but since few lawn disks can cut so deeply, the golden rule of lawn building is to disk as deeply as possible.
Five or six disks are not too many.
Remember that the better and deeper the fertilizer is mixed with the soil. the better the lawn will be and the less sensitive it will be to drought and summer heat.
Next, the fine grading begins and the surface is made as smooth and even as possible. The final finishing touches are important.
Surface irregularities will cause the power mower to bounce about next summer as if it had sprung for wheels.
The lawn bed is probably smooth enough when the neighbors stop watching and cease commenting.
Now that everything is ready, what kind of grass will make the best lawn?
There is no better grass than good, old-fashioned bluegrass mixed with a little white clover.
Fancy seed mixtures usually lead in time to a pure stand of bluegrass anyway.
Wherever bluegrass will grow, it might as well be planted on purpose and excused from the preliminary competition with other species.
A little white clover of any common variety gives an added touch of green during the first summer and stimulates the bluegrass to do its best.
Within 4 years, usually, the clover fades away, leaving a rich carpet of bluegrass.
Right after seeding, by all means, add a topdressing of ammonium nitrate at the rate of 3/4 pound per 100 square feet (7 1/2 pounds per 1000 square feet).
Lightly rake the nitrate and seed together into the upper film of soil. This nitrogen gives the germinating seeds a start in life and enables them to put forth roots to hold the soil during late fall rains.
Layer Of “Black Dirt” Is Rarely Necessary
Someone certainly will advise the amateur gardener to finish with a layer of “black dirt.” Rarely is this necessary.
The thorough mixing of lime, phosphate, potash, and nitrate will contribute more to the health of a lawn than any amount of black soil.
Although this abnormal soil looks impressively fertile, frequently, it is astonishingly infertile and almost always contains a fantastic number of weed seeds and fragments of quack grass stolons.
If it’s necessary to add soil when grading, an ordinary farm loan is infinitely better than the expensive black soil.
An old, threadbare lawn is a sorry sight. The best way to rejuvenate such a lawn is to plow it up and plant a new one the way the plot should have been planted in the first place. But such a drastic procedure is expensive and often impractical.
So if you must work with an old, worn-out lawn without disturbing it, simply resign yourself to the fact that mere treatment of a lawn, when it has been too long delayed—can only be second-best.
Taking Care Of Lawn
An old lawn that has already seen its best days should be limed and fertilized twice a year, just after growth begins in spring and fall.
The fall top dressing should consist of 5 pounds of agricultural lime per 100 square feet (50 pounds per 1,000 square feet) and 3/4 pounds of a 10-10-10 mixed fertilizer per 100 square feet (7 1/2 pounds per 1,000 square feet).
The spring treatment should consist of the same amount of lime and 1 1/4 pounds of mixed fertilizer per 100 square feet (12 1/2 pounds per L000 square feet).
After two such fertilizations, reduce the amount of time by one-half.
All lawns, no matter how carefully they have been established or how perfect they appear, should receive a little fertilizer twice each year.
The treatment for old and starving lawns has already been described, but even new lawns on well-prepared, heavily fertilized soil should be fed a little.
In fall, they should receive about 3/4 pound of a 12-6-6 fertilizer per 100 square feet (7 1/2 pounds per 1,000 square feet), and in spring, 1 1/4 pounds.
Take care not to feed your lawn, ready to cause new infections next year.
Practice Clean Culture
Organiculturists will argue that composting such material will destroy the parasites. This would be true if the pile were always properly made and expertly handled.
But my observations have revealed that few gardeners make the right compost pile and that the parasitic organisms are not destroyed in such piles.
I firmly believe that the relatively small amount of additional organic matter conserved is not worth the risk of reintroducing the parasitic organisms back into the garden via improperly composted material.
Thus far I have mentioned only microscopic organisms that can be kept down by a fall cleanup. It is well to remember that many insect pests also can be thus curbed.
The hollow-stemmed top growth of such plants as dahlias and corn, which may harbor borers and other insects over the winter, should also be gathered and burned.
The tops of snap bean plants infested with Mexican bean beetle larvae and adults should be burned.
If this material is thrown on the compost pile, the insects have ample opportunity to crawl or fly to hibernating spots in and around the garden.
Still another way to reduce insect damage is by practicing clean culture, for keeping weeds under control eliminates a common breeding place for many kinds of insects.
To forestall a flood of letters from organic gardeners to Editor Ted Weston, I shall conclude this brief piece by stating that compost made from disease- and insect-free vegetable matter is valuable!
Aid For Rooting Cuttings
As the season for bringing in tender plants approaches, one must decide whether to lift the entire plant or to take cuttings.
If the latter course is decided on, one might well consider rooting the cuttings with the aid of Airwrap, made of Vinylite plastic film.
Large cuttings can be packaged together for rooting simply by laying them on moist sphagnum moss spread along one edge of a long sheet of the green-striped Vinylite plastic film.
A thin layer of moss is then spread over the ends of the cuttings, and the film is folded lengthwise and, with the leaves protruding, is rolled up and tied or secured with elastic bands.
According to the manufacturers, roots will develop on such plants in from 4 days to 2 weeks, depending on the type of plant and the conditions to which -it is exposed during the rooting process.
44659 by F L. Wynd