Jojogirl11, Thank you for sharing your problem with a glue down floor over concrete. I had thought only hollowness came from floating a floor over concrete. I leveled the floor myself before the installer came so before my water damage, my floated engineered wood floor felt like a solid floor. I hope the installers fix the problem since they should have told you that they needed to level the floor. Please keep us updated.

Just home after 2 weeks to discover our newly laid turf was all brown even after heaps of rain. My husband went to Bunnings for advice and was given grub destroyer. I was absolutley devastated when I found out how toxic the spray was (chrorpyrifos). We have a toddler who put every thing in his mouth. We can't go outside for out least three weeks. Apparently in stays in the soil for at least 8 months!!!! Does anyone have any environmently sound and chemical free ideas to get rid of lawn grubs or even a deterrent rather than put my child at risk. I've been told they usually come back every year but I refuse to use that toxic spray again!!!!!

Are they Fire Ants? You certainly don't want an infestation of those. I think that you should call the place from which you bought your sod and complain loudly. Bringing home a population of ants of any kind is not acceptable. The health of the sod is secondary to that of your dog! You can't use diazinon on any area used by people or pets! Ever! It is banned in many areas and hopefully not available on the market for homeowners. Do your own research on Talstar and decide if it's a good option for you or not. Knowing what kind of ants you're dealing with is important. Make that a priority so that you can fine tune the control.

Sure, I understand. The research from Iowa State on corn gluten meal as an organic preemergent is one of the most scandalous money grabs I've seen. Sure, it's peer reviewed and all that other happy horsecrap. That study is as legit as can be. It's just that the results were blown way out of proportion. Does it work as a preemergent? Well, compared to nothing, maybe. They were able to achieve UP TO 80% success under very specific circumstances using twice as much as they recommend using. Even if you could replicate their findings, is 80% good enough? I don't think so. With ordinary corn meal against St Augustine diseases, I have had 100% success 17 years in a row. That is all I'm saying. I'm not trying to claim my results would stand up at a university, but in my world, it works. That is what these forums are for - sharing what seems to work. If were sharing only university verified processes and materials, the forum would not look anything like this. What about plowing? Are there any double blind, placebo controlled, peer reviewed, randomized studies demonstrating that plowing is better than no-till farming? Or does plowing just appear promising? Here's one more grass related. Core aeration. Golf courses get a hydrophobic fungus on their greens, apparently because they water lightly every day. After the entire green gets the fungus, light watering does not penetrate. It sits in droplets on top of the grass. Core aeration opens up holes for water to penetrate, but a golf course cannot have plugs of soil on their greens. They tried tine aeration. That is largely ineffective. They tried fungicides, and that seems to work, so they tested many different ones. These university studies were all funded by Big Fungicide. Then the Cascade Plus company came in promoting their surfactant as an alternative to fungicide. They paid for the university studies. They were promising, so the fungicide testing began to include Cascade Plus among the candidates. As it turned out, Cascade Plus was equally effective at allowing the water to penetrate the turf as the fungicides. The problem with corn meal is that there is no Big Corn Meal to fund university testing. Even if there was, what is the market for the final product? It seems to work as a disease prevention/killer in the Gulf States on St Augustine. That's not much of a market.