If you are interested in safe and natural lawn care, chances are that you are also interested in Organic foods and how they are grown. I've been growing vegetables organically since 1971 and it was that experience that led me to believe that lawns could be cared for organically too.
This link will take you to a great article I read in Acres USA ( North America's "Voice For Eco-Agricuture" ) a number of years ago. With the costs of synthetic chemical fertilizers going through the roof, this article makes an even stronger case for Organic Agriculture today than it did in 2004.
Stuart Franklin is president of Nature's Lawn & Garden, Inc. and author of the book Building A Healthy Lawn: A Safe and Natural Approach (Storey Publishing 1988) , available at amazon.com
One of the biggest mistakes gardeners make is trying to "work" (till up, cultivate or hoe) their high clay content garden soil before it is dry enough to be worked. When you do this, the soil structure is broken down and you end up with rock-hard crusts or clumps when the soil dries.
After a long winter of snow and rain, clay beds are swelled with water and free clay particles float to the top and bond with eachother. As the clay dries out further, a hard crust forms, which eventually starts cracking, like you can see in the photo on the left. This can happen even if there is a lot of compost or organic matter in the soil.
To get the beds ready for planting, most gardeners will till or turn over their soil, perhaps mixing in more compost or fertilizer, or organic material. But if you do this before the soil has dried out enough, you are going to run into problems.
The picture below shows a bed a week after it was turned over with a shovel and left to sit and dry out.
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What has happened is that instead of the loose and crumbly structure you were expecting, the surface is now covered by hard and crusty lumps of clay- some 2" and larger. The reason this happens that the wet clay had not dried out enough, so water is still filling spaces where air would be if the clay was drier. So the clay, being too wet and sticky will not crumble apart. It splits into clumps instead, and some of these clumps end up one on top of the soil. As these clumps dry out they become extremely hard.
Many gardeners have experienced the disappointment of having their soil look worse after turning it over than it did beforehand. It happens all over the country on all types of clay soils. But, I believe that Northern gardeners, who need to wait all winter and much of the spring for their cold and wet soils to dry out, are probably more guilty of "premature cultivation" than their southern counterparts. I admit, there were many springs where I jumped the gun.
So, how do you tell when your soil is ready to be worked? It's simple. Take a handful of soil and squeeze it in your hands into a ball. Then try to break it apart between your fingers, and see if it separates easily. I like to compare it to the feel of a handful of moist raisins that will clump together when squeezed, but will break apart with a quick rub of the fingers. If your soil stays rubbery and doesn't crumble, it is still too wet to work.
Eventually your clay soil will dry out deep enough to work. It may be very late into the spring before that occurs. However,since the top inch or two of soil will warm up and dry out faster than the deeper areas, you can usually do some seeding or shallow planting a few weeks earlier. If you do plan to till, make sure the soil has dried all the way down to the depth that you plan to dig down to.
Salvaging a bad situation. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you just can't wait long enough for all or part of the garden to dry out before cultivating it. If you do till or dig up a wet soil, there is one thing you can do that will probably prevent the hard crusting on top: After cultivating, smooth out the soil and cover it with a layer of mulch about 1/2 -1 inch thick or more. Use anything that will keep the clay from drying too fast on top. Shredded bark, leaves, straw, pine needles, compost or even peat moss will do.
Improving Clay Soils. When you have improved your clay soil it will drain faster and will warm up earlier in the spring. That means it will be workable earlier in the year. There are many things you can do to improve clay soils, including raising the beds (to allow for better drainage) and, especially, adding lots of organic matter. Organic matter is critical. Without it, there is no humus. By adding organic matter and improving aeration as well, you will create an environment that allows beneficial soil life to start working to restructure the soil and form valuable humus.
Many gardeners today, including myself, are doing no-till gardening. Instead of tilling the soil they are keeping a permanent organic mulch on top of their garden beds. By maintaining a couple of inches of shredded leaves, wood chips, straw etc...on top of the beds you will protect the soil from drying out and will provide organic matter for earthworms and microbes to decompose. You can still easily fertilize the soil with liquid nutrients or compost, and use foliar feeding throughout the season to get nutrients to plants at the proper times of the season. (See our 4 Step Garden Fertilizing Program )
Clay soil is a big problem all over the country and handling clay is one of the reasons we started our Web Store. Customers from every corner of the US and Canada can improve clay and compacted soil with our Aerify PLUS , Nature's Magic and other soil conditioning products. They can be applied right over the top of mulched beds. These are real difference makers that help make everything else you are doing for the soil work a lot better.
Soil improvement is my favorite topic because whether it is a lawn or a garden, it all begins with the soil.
Stuart Franklin is President of Nature’s Lawn & Garden, Inc. (http://www.natureslawn.com) a lawn fertilizing company and on line Web Store , located in the Buffalo, NY area. He is also the author of Building A Healthy Lawn: A Safe and Natural Approach(Storey Publications 1988). A few copies are still available at our office.
Copyrighted Materials. No part of this website, its design or any of the content may be used without the expressed permission of the author.
Clay soils can create problems in lawns. They are dense and compacted and have poor drainage.They stay soggy when wet, and turn rock hard when they dry out in the summer. When soils are this "tight", necessary air, water and nutrients can not move through them. Roots are stunted and the grass is stressed, weakened, and more prone to disease, insects and even weeds.
Most experienced gardeners know that the best way to improve clay conditions in garden beds is to till or mix in lots of organic matter –such as compost, peat moss, leaves, etc... This process can immediately improve soil aeration and drainage, and will increase the beneficial soil microbes that break down the organic matter and turn it into humus. With humus you end up with an improved and more granulated soil structure. *
But how do you improve clay soil that already has a lawn growing in it? There is no way to till in organic matter down deep into and below the root zone without tilling up the lawn. The standard advice is to " top dress "the lawn with compost, leave the clippings, fertilize organically and wait... and wait... and wait for all of that organic matter to eventually decompose and improve the soil. But the denser the clay, the longer it will take for this to occur – often many years.
The reason it takes so long for clays to improve when top dressed as above is that the soil microbes necessary for decomposing organic matter are "Aerobic" - meaning they need air/oxygen to survive. Clay, which is made up of microscopic-sized particles tightly bonded together, has a very little air space in it- most of it near the soil surface.
A Faster Solution
If you could increase the amount of air in the clay by just a small amount, you can encourage the beneficial soil-building microbes to generate and grow in numbers. One way to do this is by creating temporary pores and channels in the clay with a soil penetrant calledAerify PLUS –Liquid Soil Aerator and Bioactivator. (Yes, we are promoting our product, but frankly, it is a real difference maker)
Aerify PLUSbreaks apart clay bonds to create microscopic air space deep into the clay. Each application can work deeper. It also adds liquid organic matter to help generate and feed beneficial soil microbes of all types (including mycorrhizae) at the same time. It helps improve drainage in your lawn clay, encourages deeper rooting, frees up nutrients and water in the root zone and helps move organic matter deeper into the soil. By improving clay conditions you can create a much healthier lawn in a more bioactive soil.
Additionally, once your lawn clay begins to open up, the soil becomes healthier and earthworms will start to appear in your soil in greater numbers.Earthworms will enhance and speed up the soil improvement process because they aerate the soil as the tunnel up and down.They also digest thatch and other organic matter in the soil andconvert it into humus and rich,fertile castings.
If your lawn is growing in a poor clay soil, it will always be prone to the problems that come with clay - compaction, poor drainage, fungus, moss, weeds, poor nutrient availability and color, root-stress and a host of other undesirable conditions. Improve the clay and you will improve the lawn. It is as simple as that.
FYI, I treated my own lawn organically for many years and top dressed with compost as well. Though the top 4-5 inches eventually got pretty good, the clay underneath remained gray and sticky. After a few seasons of treating with Aerify PLUS, it was as if all the organics that I had put in the soil finally became were able to be utilized down deep where I wanted it to go. My lawn clay soil became dark and crumbly more than 1½ feet deep- and earthworms abound.
Stuart Franklin is President of Nature’s Lawn & Garden, Inc. (http://www.natureslawn.com), located in the Buffalo, NY area.
He is also the author of Building A Healthy Lawn- A Safe and Natural Approach (Storey Publishing 1988) which is now out of print, but some copies are still available. Write to info@natureslawn.com
Copyrighted Materials. No part of this website, its design or any of the content may be used without the expressed permission of the author.
Before stores and infomercials started selling grass repair, or patching products in a bag, groundskeepers at golf courses made up their own mixture and used it to fill in divots and bare spots. I do the same thing for my own yard and so do many landscapers. It is very quick and easy to make and use, and it allows you to put in exactly the type of seed that you want to use. Plus, it is way less expensive than the products sold in stores or on infomercials.
Here is all you need to do. Put in a bushel or two of garden soil into a wheel barrow. Thoroughly mix in an equivalent amount of compost. If you don't have compost you can use vermiculite, perlite, or sphagnum peat moss (the brown peat that comes in bales). You want to end up with a spongy, crumbly, water-holding mixture, much like a potting soil. In fact, you could use bagged potting soil instead of this mixture if you don’t have the other ingredients at hand.
Next, mix enough grass seed so you see plenty of seed in every handful. When spread on the lawn you want to see 15-20 seeds per sq. inch. Use a grass seed that matches what you already have in your lawn. If you don't know, bring a sample to a local nursery. If you have some starter fertilizer around put a cup or two in the batch. This is not critical if your soil is fairly healthy and regular fertilized. You can always fertilize after the grass up. We recommend All-In-One for Lawns if you like using liquid fertilizers.
Over Seeding With Your Grass Patch.
If you are using this mixture to over seed a thin area of the lawn that does not have dead or bare spots, simply toss the mixture over the lawn wherever it is thin. If necessary, rake the lawn lightly afterwards to get the mixture to drop down off the grass blades. That's it. You are done.
To get the grass seed to actually grow it is critical to keep the seed damp until the grass is established. Give it a good watering to get things started. If the soil below the seed was dry, really soak it deeply. The grass patch mixture will be nice and dark when damp so it will be easy to see if and when it dries out. Depending on the time of year, and the amount of rain you get, you may need to water once or twice a day, or maybe once or twice a week. The soil should not be soggy, it just needs to be damp. Once the grass sprouts and starts to root deeper and toughen up you can gradually phase out the watering to once or twice a week, enough to keep the soil from getting too dry. Again, it depends on your local weather conditions as regards to temperature, precipitation and even wind, which dries out soils too.
When over seeding you will probably also find a few areas that are either just bare soil or spots of completely dead grass. You will need to do things a little differently and follow the Spot Seeding steps below.
Spot Seeding With Your Grass Patch
STEP 1. If there is thickly matted dead grass or Thatch covering the spot you want to seed, you would need to remove that as your first step. If you try to seed on top of that, the seed would sprout but the roots would not be able to get into the soil and the new grass would die within a couple of weeks.
If you find that by removing the matted grass you have created a low spot in the lawn, fill that with topsoil to even things out. Tamp the soil down lightly with your foot
STEP 2. (Skip this step if you have added topsoil to fill in a low spot.) Scratch up the area you are spot seeding with a dirt rake, garden weasel or some other tool that would loosen up the soil at least 1/2 inch down. This will help the new seed dig into the soil quickly. Smooth out the area so it is level.
STEP 3. Top these areas with your homemade grass patch mixture. Put it on about 1/2" thick and make sure it covers all the scratched up soil areas.
STEP 4. Water. As per above, you need to keep the grass patch moist until the new seed is well established.
For better results, before the seed sprouts make sure you hit it with either our Aerify PLUS (especially if you have Clay soil) or Nature’s Magic. They both contain trace nutrients that will stimulate faster rooting and will generate beneficial root fungi called mycorrhizae (my-core-rhy'-zee)
Note: If you are filling in deeper ruts or holes, don’t fill them with your home-made grass patch and waste it that way. Grass seeds deeper than 1/2 to 3/4 inches will have a hard time sprouting. Use regular soil to fill the holes or ruts, tamp it down lightly and only put your home-made grass patch on the very top.
This section is for people who are looking for non-pesticide ways to get rid of existing weeds. This will be an open forum, meaning we'd like to hear from you if you have found something that works and are willing to share it with the gardening world. In other posts we will talk about building up and balancing the soil and improving overall grass health as deterrents to weeds. We want to limit this section to home remedies or natural products that have shown good results.
Here are a couple of recipes that have worked for us:
Borax laundry powder contains the element boron, one of the minor plant nutrients. Excessive boron is toxic to plants. However, University of Iowa research found that Ground Ivy ( creeping charlie) is more sensitive to boron than northern turfgrasses.
By applying Borax at a rate that is toxic to Ground Ivy, but not strong enough to kill turfgrass, you can safely eliminate some of this invasive weed. You may also get some dieback on clover and a few other weeds.
Precautionary note. Do not use a watering can to apply. Use a pump or hand sprayer only. If your lawn turns yellow from the borax, water thoroughly to move the boron through the soil. Do not treat again if the lawn is sensitive to the borax.
Recipe:
Mix 10 oz. (1 1/4th cup) of Borax in 1 gallon of hot water in a hand pump sprayer. Shake or stir really well until completely dissolved. Then mix in a tablespoon of dish soap.
Apply early in the day before the heat closes the pores of the plants. The time period when the dew has mostly dried off would be ideal. Or apply in the evening after sunset. Set your sprayer to a fine spray pattern. Simply coat all visible Ground Ivy with your spray solution. One gallon should cover up to 1000 sf. Repeat the application in two weeks if the grass shows no sign of boron sensitivity (yellowing).
For small areas using a hand spray bottle, dissolve 5 teaspoons of Borax in a quart of water. This will cover 25 square feet.
ALL-PURPOSE WEED and VEGETATION KILLER. Caution – this will kill grass too!
Recipe:
Mix 1 cup of regular table salt with 1 gallon or white vinegar in a 1 gallon pump sprayer. Shake really well until the salt dissolves fully. Then add 1 tablespoon of liquid dish soap and shake a bit or stir to mix it in. For a smaller batch mix in a 1 quart trigger spray bottle using 1/4 cup of salt with 1 quart of vinegar and then a teaspoon of dish soap.
The easiest way to apply is to set your hand sprayer or pump sprayer to a coarse mist and spray the leaves of undesirable plants. That is where it will be absorbed most easily. Try to get the undersides of the leaves where possible. Just wet the leaves and don't waste your ingredients trying to spray stems. If you are spraying to kill grass then just wet the leaf blades.
You may have to repeat these applications once or twice to fully kill the weed. Plants with well developed root systems may be able to recover from the initial spraying so if you see any signs of life 5-7 days later, hit them again. Remember to apply early in the day before the heat closes the pores of the plants. The time period when the dew has mostly dried off would be ideal.
DO NOT use a sprayer if you are trying to kill weeds in a lawn or weeds that are nestled in between desirable plants. You'll kill the grass or plants too. Instead, get a small paintbrush and paint the leaves of the unwanted plant with your solution. (This paintbrush idea will also work for those of you who want to use Round-up on weeds or undesirable grass types in the lawn).
Never pour this solution on garden or lawn areas. The excessive salt could ruin the soil and prevent anything at all from growing.
Lawn Force 5 (formerly called All-In-One for LAWNS) is gradually becoming the liquid lawn fertilizer of choice for homeowners across the United States. This easy to apply product does more that just fertilize: It decomposes thatch, it helps aerate the soil, it deepens roots and it helps bio-activate and improve soil structure. This is truly a Lawn Care Kit in a Bottle.
Basically, what we have done is combined all of our best lawn care products into one. The products include:
Liquid Aerify. A high strength soil penetrant that loosens Clay and improves aeration, drainage, soil structure and rooting.
Nature's Magic. Our best organic soil and plant activation product that contains highest quality liquid seaweed (kelp) and humic acids
Contrary to what most people believe, thatch is not simply grass clippings that aren't decomposing. Clippings can add to a thatch problem once the problem exists, but generally, clippings are very beneficial to the lawn when you have a healthy, bioactive soil. They decompose and recycle in as little as two weeks and help provide nutrients and organic matter.
Thatch is actually a matted layer - of roots, stems, blades, runners and clippings - that forms on top of the soil. You might describe it as a lawn that is growing into itself rather than into the soil. If you try to poke your finger through your lawn and into the soil, and find that there is a matted, vegetative barrier of about 1/2 inch thick or more, you have a real thatch condition. I've seen thatch as thick as 3 inches.
In the image below you can see how the tightly matted thatch layer is sitting on top of the soil:
If you have real thatch, like above, then there is no way you can remove it with a dethatching machine ( sometimes called a power rake). Such machines can barely penetrate the thatch layer before tearing the grass right out of the soil. In our lawn care business we handle thatch with a 2 pronged approach. First we improve the soil under the thatch with our Aerify PLUS to make it easier and more desirable for the roots to dig deeper. Then we add on specific decomposition microbes using our Biological Dethatcher product. This digests the dead organic matter and turns it into beneficial humus. More on this below.
Thatch can take years to develop on a lawn, but when lawns are sodded and not cared for properly you can get what I would call "instant thatch" . It happens when you lay sod on top of the soil and the sod does not root into the soil quickly or deeply.
This often happens when the soil below the newly installed sod is dry and you don't water heavily enough to get through the sod to saturate the soil.
The water stays in the sod and that's where the roots stay too.
In some cases you get "instant thatch" because the soil underneath the sod is a very hard subsoil, and nothing can penetrate it.
The Problems With Thatch
Thatch is undesirable for many reasons, a major one being that the roots of your grass are up in the thatch, and only barely in the soil (see the drawing below). This is not a healthy state and it makes the grass highly susceptible to insects, drought, and winter-kill. If the grass is not anchored in the soil, winter frost or ice could actually lift the thatch right out of the soil. When you have thatch, you have a weaker lawn. It is only a matter of time before something kills it off.
A matted thatch layer will act like a sponge to absorb the rain or your watering. This wet matted layer promotes disease. If the thatch is thick, and the water isn't heavy enough, it might not even get through the thatch into the soil. The soil eventually dries out, and the grass roots will have to grow into the thatch layer itself-where there is some moisture-instead of into the dry soil. And this will only add more to the thatch layer. And it gets worse from there.
One way to help get water through the thatch layer and into the soil, is to put on some dish soap before watering or before a rain. This will help thin out the water allowing faster penetration. 2 or 3 oz. per 1000 sf should do the trick.
You could also put on a light application of Aerify or Aerify PLUS , before watering. You should test to see how deep your water is penetrating by cutting into the soil with a spade and looking to see if the soil underneath the thatch is moist or not.
The only time when thatch may be desirable is when the grass is growing over tree roots near the surface. In this case, there is hardly any soil so the grass is doing what it can to survive.
Why Thatch Forms
There can be a few reasons for thatch forming on lawns aside from the poor sodding situation as mentioned above. But in general, a thatch condition indicates that there is something wrong with your soil. It is either preventing the grass from rooting (compaction or clay) or it is not bioactive or healthy enough to promote the decomposition of dead organic matter. Your soil should be teeming with microlife instead of "dead", or sterile. If you've been to our website at www.natureslawn.com you know that soil improvement is our main focus.
Soil compaction, clay, and poor pH (too acidic or alkaline), will all discourage bioactivity. And if you've used a lot of conventional lawn fertilizers that are high in chlorides or salts, or you've used excessive pesticides. you may have killed off a lot of beneficial soil micro-life yourself.
FYI:Lack of earthworms is an indicator of a bad soil. In fact, you'll rarely see thatch where earthworms are abundant because along with being great soil aerators, they are one of nature's best thatch digesters.
THE SOLUTION
You can not handle a real thatch condition with a dethatching machine or power rake. You would end up ripping out the lawn. These machines will take care of surface issues like dead or matted grass, clippings and debris - and you can have bushels of that stuff with some grass types. But as far as getting out the real thatch, the interwoven mat, it would barely scratch the surface of it.
The real solution to thatch, and the best way to prevent it, is to improve your soil so it is aerated and bioactive enough to get the thatch to decompose. When you do this, the thatch - which is part Organic Matter, will gradually begin to break down from the bottom (where it is in contact with the soil) up. It will turn into rich, dark humus. It can take a couple of years to fully break up the thatch, but it will happen.
Here are some other factors and tips to help you get rid of thatch through decomposition:
You need to keep the soil moist underneath the thatch layer. When it dries out, decomposition ceases. Less frequent, heavy waterings are best. If you water too often and keep the whole thatch layer moist all the time, you are asking for trouble with fungus. Also, you want to encourage the roots to go down into the soil for water and not stay in a wet thatch layer.
Collect your clippings until the thatch problem is handled. They will only add to the thatch.
Test the pH and add Lime as needed. If your soil is Acidic it could dramatically slow down or even prevent thatch decomposition. Over-liming will also cause the same problems.
Increase thatch degrading bioactivity. You can do this by improving your soil quality with compost or simple compost teas (soak compost in a bucket of water for a day and spray the liquid over the lawn). You can treat the thatch with Biological Dethatcher. It contains specific microbes and enzymes designed to generate and accelerate thatch decomposition.
Improve soil aeration. Thatch-degrading microbes, and most beneficial soil microbes need air to survive. Compacted or heavy clay soils suppress the micro-life in the soil. Improving aeration is a must if you want to increase the soil bioactivity. Visit our website for more information on better ways to increase aeration.
Your lawn will need regular fertilizing because soil microorganisms need nitrogen to decompose thatch. You want to avoid any fertilizers that contain muriate of potash (potassium chloride) because chlorides can be harmful to soil life. Straight organic granular fertilizers may not be the best choice here because unless they are water soluble, they will sit on top of the thatch layer and be very slow to break down and release their nutrients. After all, a lot of the thatch is already organic matter that isn't breaking down fast enough.
Liquid fertilizers may be the best idea when thatch exists. They will go right through to the soil when watered in, and won't get stuck in the thatch Monthly or twice monthly applications of a salt and chlorine free liquid fertilizer will provide more available nitrogen and therefore will promote faster thatch decomposition. LAWN FORCE 5 is a liquid fertilizer that also contains our Biological Dethatcher along with some Aerify PLUS.
written by Stuart Franklin - Author of Building A Healthy Lawn: A Safe and Natural Approach and President of Nature's Lawn and Garden.
