Hello Everyone, I'm trying to figure out if I can fix this issue myself rather than hire someone. I've got a yard about 1000sqft. and two summers ago we had let the yard go where the grass was completely burned, dry an gone. We had left it and over the months and into last summer it had begun to grow mostly weeds. We had let it overgrow due to us not having the time to maintain, so now we have a yard that is mostly weeds and not grass. Also along the neighbors wooden fence line the soil is very soft and is growing mostly moss b/c it is always in the shade and never gets any sun. What can I do to overtake the weeds and grass growing back again, as well as fix and prevent my problem along the fence line. I just mowed it yesterday to cut the weeds down but I really want to remedy the problem so we can use the yard to play in. Thanks for your help!

Danela - I'm going to assume your mix of a lawn actually has some grass, and you havent had some sort of total grass kill from disease, drought, etc. If that is the case, you want to promote your grass. Since you are in Dallas, your grass will spread and fill in bare spots and start to take over weeds. Here is what I would do: 1. Dont seed, focus on the grass that is already living in your yard. 2. Make sure your lawn guy mows weekly. Grass is meant to be mowed, weeds are not. 3. Feed your lawn every 2 months in the spring & summer. You said you dont want chemicals, and there are tons of good organic fertilizers out there. To keep it simple, go to Lowes and get a bag of Milorganite and put it down. If not Lowes, Home Depot has Scotts Organic Choice Lawn Food. 4. Dont use any chemicals, including vinegar on your lawn. The vinegar you are using kills grass too. 5. Keep up with the weed popper. Its a great non-chemical solution, but a pain in the butt. Keep in mind that every weed you pull, you are also preventing it from producing weed seeds and future weeds to pull. If you do 2 hours a week for the entire season, you will be amazed and how it looks by August. If you are still reading, this step is the most important behind the weekly mowing. 6. Water deeply, when there is no rain. Grass doesnt need that much water, I still havent turned on my sprinklers for the year. When you do need to water, you want to water deeply so that the grass roots get the water and the shallower weed roots dont get enough water. In a Texas summer you want to simulate an inch of rainfall a week with your sprinklers. Figure out how long you have to run your sprinklers to get an inch. I put shallow bowls in my yard and figured out it is about a 45mins to an hour per station. If you dont have automatic spriklers, it will probably be 1 1/2 hours per spot. Once you have figured out how much to water to get 1 inch of water, give your grass 1 inch of water a week in a single day. Adjust for any rain you received that week. You also want to keep an eye on your sprinklers to make sure an area is not saturated. If you notice water running off the yard and down the street, stop (or move to the next station), let the water soak in and then continue watering to get 1 inch of water. If you do the above, you should have a pretty good yard by the end of the summer, without a ton of work, $ or chemicals. The following years will be much easier. If you really get into it the following years, we can help you worry about cutting height, specific problem areas, etc and get your lawn looking like a golf course. For now, just worry about the basics above. Good luck and hope that helps.

Depends on who is doing the accepting. The EPA exceptional quality rating is advertised as a good thing by milorganite. For me, its a bit of a hypothesis I cannot disprove at this time, or hopefully ever. And its about money, so being a man of modern times I have to ask what the EPA is missing. I need to understand more about natural metals I guess. One way I do that is place the behavior of these resellers of waste into a broad context and see if the behavior they exhibit seems odd. In this case of the 72 page report, some ferts most definitely have high numbers. But when filtered, Zinc amendments having high levels of zinc is, well, what did you expect? Plants have grown into existence using metals. Red clay is red because of Iron and Oxygen. The real inclusive question that I have not yet answered for myself is what exposure does nature give me here, and how do these levels compare a fertilizer at say .5 lb-2 lb/ 1000sf / year, and include accumulation in the answer. I got kinda excited and a little freaked when I realized a pathway exists to reroute commercial wastes into fertilizers as carriers and so forth; It is a great idea socially but for adults only. I personally cannot stomach the writings of extremist California thinkers like Mike Schaffer who wave the purity flag for political money and have a all or nothing approach to toxicity. I read that often, as you ask, toxicity is a simple matter of quantity. Finding reasonable published academic sources that do not have to use parenthesis to explain their own words has been my muse lately. I would rather read Bryant Redhawk. I would even propose that trace metals needed by plant and other life are perhaps like a flu shot where a little bit innoculates? Thats a different view. But millenia ago who knows what plants had to do to adapt. I am still learning about your question.

You have some crabgrass and some clover. Possibly some plantain and other broadleaf weeds going on. Aerate and overseed this month. Apply pre-emergent crabgrass control in early spring. Here is a link to the CT Agricultural Experiment Station’s lawn care information for fertilizing. https://www.ct.gov/caes/cwp/view.asp?a=2815&q=376936 Are you watering the lawn? I’m in CT and we’ve had a very dry summer. It’s also been a bad year for crabgrass for some reason. Some people like to do a lot more complicated lawn care, more pesticides, more frequent fertilizer, blanket applications of broadleaf weed killers whether needed or not. Many people mow way too short. I’d rather spot treat the broadleaf weeds than treat the whole lawn. Weed and feed products are for broadleaf weeds, so if you had crabgrass sprouting in mid-summer, the product wouldn’t have any effect on it. You would have to use a product specifically for killing crabgrass. Sometimes it has to be repeated to be effective.You could also repeat the pre-emergent crabgrass preventer during the summer, as the early spring application’s effectiveness does wear off after a while.