I was looking into using a neighbors clippings to add to leaves in the fall for compost and was wondering if it would be ok. The information may be helpful. Some herbicides breakdown quickly, other's don't. One thing I read said you shouldn't use grass clippings treated with herbicide in compost or garden mulch all season long. This one indicates you have to wait at least 3 mowings another indicates that dicamba (Banvel is very slow to break down and that if grass clippings that were treated with dicamba are used in a compost pile, that compost should only be used on the lawn. Not trying to scare you, but it's important to know what was used before deciding how long to wait. In most states, you have to be licensed and take regular tests to apply these treatments so whoever applied it should be very familiar with it. I recommend you give them a call, ask what was used, how much was applied, tell them you are planning to hand pull the veronica and ask them how long you should wait. I thought most places required applicators to give you an instruction sheet after an application that would also indicated what was used. At least tell you when to take the little flags out :) I guess not every place is the same.

Re; Cow manure. Your compost is likly weed free judging from the origional contents. The manure is high in nitrogen which will restart the compost heating , but adding cow manure (fresh,old and crusty or otherwise) will probably contain a lot of weed seed. You would also reset the clock for composting the manure and thereby delaying when it will be totaly finished. Now,back to the unlimited supply of cow manure. It makes very good compost without other additions other than moisture.Just heap it up and keep it damp while turning same as you have been or skip the turning and get same result over a longer period. Back to your origional question about adding manure to incomplete compost made with leaves and kitchen scraps. That is a good idea once the manure has gone through initial high heat and decompsiton kill viability of seeds. Starting with manure mixed with other material is also fine since the high heat stage will occur. If you have room to maintain multiple piles/bins of compostiable material,that can actualy reduce time spent vs quanity of compost produced. As you found when you just let the material sit long enough without turning,it winds up fine compost. Toss every thing togeather in a "NURSE" pile as it becomes available or you can shanghai family and frinds as free labor in bringing it to the nurse pile. Continue with the two batchs as you are doing now paying attention to detail on moisture and turning while the nurse pile quitly go's about it's business with minium attention. When you are ready to start a new batch,pull material which is weeks or months along in the process from nurse pile and begain working it. There will be times when material has been in the nurse pile long enough to be finished and useably with little to no effort on your part other than gathering and moveing material to the pile.

Hi Steffie, The reason that Roundup never lasts this long when you use it is because you read and follow label directions and apply the stuff properly, which your neighbor apparently did not do. :-) So, how does your yard recover? Recovery shouldn't be impossible to achieve because Roundup has "no soil residual activity". However, how long it takes to recover can vary, depending on which formulation of Roundup was used. In general, when Roundup is properly applied, you should see re-growth within one to two months. In some cases, you can reseed an area within 7 to 10 days of applying regular-strength Roundup, or even just 1 day later if you are a farmer using Roundup Ready seed. If your neighbor used one of the newer formulations of Roundup that have additional active ingredients to prevent regrowth, you may have a little trouble getting ryegrass to grow there this fall. For example, Round-Up Extended Control Concentrate has the standard glyphosate, but also has diquat and imazapiz. These additional ingredients can prevent re-growth for 3 to 4 months. I like your idea of scalping the lawn and planting ryegrass seed to help protect the area from runoff and erosion during the rainy winter. The ryegrass also will help keep cool-season weeds from sprouting. If your soil has suffered severe contamination, you might have to add something like Zeolite to the soil. I don't think it will be necessary in this case because Roundup shouldn't have an effect in the soil. But, all the research on Roundup describes its effects under proper usage only. I hope you have success fixing this problem your neighbor created. I also hope she has learned to be more careful about chemical runoff. Dawn

Fortunately I'm not responsible for the flowers in my household, but agree too many variables to attribute to the mulch. But by all means try some other mulch. Stepping back a little, I think there's different points and goals going on here. One is mulch as a weed suppressant, and mulch as long-term soil amendment/enrichment. All organic mulches eventually contribute to a decent soil, once they've broken down. In thick enough layers, they deprive weeds below of sunlight, and generally make weeding easier, if weeds are less numerous and in loose mulch. Healthy perennials and annuals planted below that mulch do fine. Then there's mulch that doesn't provide a good environment for germinating (hence we bring seedlings in and plant through/below the mulch). This is where I think these ideas that e.g. wood chips steal nitrogen and pine needles are too acidic - they may well be environments that are hostile to germination/growth of young plants in the mulch above the soil. The points are true in a specific sense but don't generalise to e.g. compost made from this stuff or what it does to full grown plants. As a mulch, that may be true at the top mulch layer, but won't matter much several inches down if plants have rooted. If it was true when the mulch was first laid down, decomposition and time will deal with the imbalances (ph level tends to neutral, nitrogen "hungry' mulch gets colonised by fungi and bacteria that bring their nitrogen with them, some natural chemicals get broken down over time). So yeah, for example, under conifers with lots of needles underneath, not much else grows, and if you test that top layer, it may be acidic. So not much new germinates or grows under (some) big conifers - although that is almost certainly partly due to lack of light and the soil that the conifers prefer to grow in, too, not to mention their heavy consumption of nutrients in the soil and root systems, etc. (Also true under some other trees too so it's not just needles) Anyway, sorry for the verbiage, still comes down to 'if something seems to be working, keep doing that', perhaps supplemented by 'if something doesn't work, it doesn't mean the mulch you just tried was the issue' (although clearly didn't solve the problem either).