georgiaturf.com
There are lawn care calenders and articles on how to tackle specific problems.

What kind of grass do you have?

There are people here with knowledge about different types of grass and their requirements. If you tell us what you've got, somebody will be able to help you.

I have Bermuda grass. The website given by the first poster seems pretty helpful. Some weed and feed in every so often seems like the gist of it. In some spots that are dark on the North side of the house that will not grow grass I've thought about growing some other ground cover. Ajuga maybe, any other suggestions?

In general bermuda is not a good grass to grow in zone 7 if you won't be satisfied with only 3-4 months (1-2 months if drought) of green per year. Especially in georgia where there can be a lot of shade, heavy clay soil and mild weather most of the time. Bermuda does better in full sun and minimum temps in the 80's minimum soil temps in the 70's. If you go by the calendar and are able to water by well, pond or reuse water, and fertilize + mow constantly, you can expect 3 months of optimum performance and if you time your pre-emergent well, the best you can hope for is perfectly brown, weed-free nothing for the other 9 months of the year.

Texas weed, a frequent poster and Bermuda sod grower, wrote an article he calls the Bermuda Bible

"In general bermuda is not a good grass to grow in zone 7 if you won't be satisfied with only 3-4 months (1-2 months if drought) of green per year."

I'd disagree with that statement. I live in zone 7 in Oklahoma & my bermuda is dormant from mid November til mid March -- I have green grass from March thru November - that'd be approx 8 months green & 4 months dormant.

Here's a couple pics.... They're thumbnails that can be clicked for full size pics...

Here's what it looked like last May:
{{gwi:85425}}

Here's a shot taken in November:
{{gwi:85426}}

Oh, and here's one taken in December:
{{gwi:85427}}

My 2 cents,

Dan

Dan,

Can you post pictures of your lawn now, as it's mid-April and you're saying it should be green. I was just down about an hour South and East of Tulsa last weekend and saw the Bermuda lawns down there. I'm not doubting you, but am just curious as to what yours looks like right now.

Well, right now, while the grass is green, it looks like crap... lots of dirt showing....I was late this year to dethatch because of a late hard freeze in March -- I'll see if I can snap a pic or two in the next day or two...

Excuse me. The grass will be green, but it just "looks like crap".

Heritage, there are a few other good lawn forums around. The problem with linking to them is it will get you banned from this one. I know that from watching this forum for 16 years. People come and go and one theme for the loss of some really good ones is that they posted a link to another lawn care forum. Advertisers on this forum don't appreciate when users link directly away from their advertising.

"Lawn care professionals" on LS hall of fame :

• Q:"My customer wants me to dethatch his lawn, how do you do that?"
• Q:"My customer asked me to overseed his lawn, should I talk him out of it?" A: "If you overseed you're not going to be cutting for at least a month and not making any money, just tell him it's not needed it will fill in on its own"
• Q:"What do you if the lawn hasn't grown and doesn't need cutting?" A:"I cut it anyway, have to keep cash flowing"

etc.

My neighbor's "lawn care professional" hall of fame:

• "The bermuda didn't die last year becase the RoundUp didn't go deep enough into the soil to kill the root"
• "Yeah it's perfectly fine to seed fescue in mid-December, it will grow". Maybe he needed Christmas money? Neighbor has no lawn this spring.

Bottom line: there's a lot of dudes that wake up one morning, decide to start a lawn care company and call themselves "lawn care professionals". Caveat emptor

Pretty funny, j4c11. Lawnsite, for those of you who don't know, is a website for lawn care professionals to work out business issues. Apparently it is very good if you are considering getting into the biz. Technically I've been the moderator on the Lawnsite Organic Lawn Care forum since about 2005. If you want personal lawn care advice, they used to either ignore you or
make you very uncomfortable about sneaking into their cool website. I
was the only amateur they seemed to accept. I have some background in business and marketing, so I was able to help them promote their organic programs. I have not visited there since about 2009, but I see my password still works. Way back then they had accumulated a serious ignorance about what organic lawn care was. They were not even up to Rodale's understanding in the 1930s. By 2009 they seemed to be turned around and had a much better understanding of organic fertilizers, weed control (not really any good ones), and insect controls. I silently backed out. I know they still had some fights, but those were infights and personality clashes. As far as understanding the subject matter, they needed no moderator. They did need a parent in the room to keep them from getting their feelings hurt.

It seems the market for organic lawn care products is growing, and rapidly. I saw new organic weed control products at Lowe's the other day, some sort of oils listed on the ingredient list. Wonder how well they work and how selective they are. I think from a business perspective it makes a lot of sense, people are typically willing to pay more(and sometimes a lot more) for anything organic, so if you can offer to spread corn or alfalfa instead of synthetic fertilizer and double your profit margin, that's a big win.

The problem for licensed pros is the products they use have to be proved effective and labeled for the purpose they are using them for. Thus alfalfa pellets cannot be use, but fertilizers containing 100% alfalfa pellets can as long as the active ingredients are there and the labeling meets the state's standards for fertilizer labels. The chemical fertilizer lobby in each state will call you out for using unapproved materials and you could have your license pulled. According to one of the local "natural" material dealers, getting the testing done can cost $50,000 in Texas. He developed a product he called Rocket Fuel. It has lots of high protein and high N materials in it but he cannot call it fertilizer. When he owned the company he was unwilling to spend the money for the testing. Since selling it, the new people have apparently gotten the approval. Here's more info. I would not use that on a lawn. It's far too expensive. But if you really loved your roses, it would be good. The other thing is it stinks like bat guano.

Leave it up to the government to get in the way and hike up the cost. Costs a billion dollars to get a drug approved by the FDA, and then we wonder why drugs that cost $1,000 elsewhere cost $40,000 in the US.

Agree to a point. If you don't regulate the lawn care clan you will end up with gypsy lawn trucks. These people travel around the country with magnetic signs on their trucks. They hit a town, spread as much sawdust on lawns as they can get away with, and basically steal peoples' money. They hit a town, make some money and move the next town. This is a real thing. State licensing is supposed to fix that practice, but I'm not sure it does. It hits other trades, too. Driveway blackening is one I've seen. It always takes the locals a little time to figure out they are being had. By then the crooks have left town.