ladykitsu: I very much doubt that fireblight had anything to do with the problems of your newly planted pear trees. Fireblight attacks actively growing trees, and yours, as you describe them, have never begun to grow. Something else is causing your problems; perhaps bad nursery stock, but more likely something you are doing at planting time, perhaps allowing the roots to dry out, overwatering after planting, or God knows what. If you decide to try again, order in bareroot nursery stock from a good nursery, and plant very early; as soon as you can work in the soil without your fingers freezing. A May-planted tree that has not leafed out by August is dead for practical purposes. When putting in little trees, loosen the soil around the planting hole well, but do not add any fertilizers or other soil amendments in the planting hole. Do not overwater. And please do not try any more 4-in-1 or 3-in-1 trees until you have mastered planting the 1-in-1. You would be better off with two trees of complementary varieties than any of the multi-grafted trees. Spraying your little trees will have no effect at all on fireblight. You don't say what spray material you are using (which you should helpfully specify), but there is no spray chemical in this world that will stop an active fireblight infection once it is underway. I mention this not because I think you have fireblight, but for your future reference. If you have been spraying the trees with such frequency using a dormant spray such as oil or copper, you may have killed the trees with the spraying itself. For lurquizo: While I respect (in a way) your aversion to the use of "poisons" on your fruit trees, I ask you this question: If you had a bad case of strep throat and the doctor prescribed an antibiotic, would you take it? Fruit trees occasionally need the interventions of modern science and technology to maintain their health and productivity, and if you consistently decline to take advantage of them you will end up with dead trees. Fireblight is a bacterial disease, easy to spot on pear trees by the blackened leaves and the shepherd's crook bend at the ends of dead shoots. It starts early, and, while heat and rainfall may favor its spread, you can have both heat and rain and still largely eliminate fireblight by using two sprays of agricultural streptomycin; one at full bloom, and another about a week later. Streptomycin is an antibiotic, not your usual chemical, that stops fireblight before it gets started. Like so many other fruit trees diseases, prevention is the key, since once a disease like this gets going it is impossible to cure. I don't know where you are located (you should say), but here in Northern Virginia we have more than a month of temperatures in the mid-90's and occasional thunderstorms. But I have no fireblight in my orchard of over 65 trees because I applied streptomycin twice; in late April and early May. Streptomycin has no effect whatsoever on honeybees (which I keep here) or other beneficial insects. General "trimming" of the trees in the hope of eliminating fireblight will not work. If fireblight does appear during the growing season, pruning must be prompt and targeted at the infected branches. When you cut through a branch, inspect the interior to see if the wood is completely healthy with no signs of interior blackening. Keep pruning down until you see no more suspicious color within the branches or twigs. Gardening is not so tough once you figure out and cooperate with nature's cycles, and are willing to use carefully targeted chemical interventions when that becomes neccessary. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

I agree with most of what has been said. However, RoundUp will not work against any of the remaining soybean plants. Unless your previous owner was stuck in the stone age, all the soybean seed sold now is RoundUp-Ready. That means you can spray RU on it all day long and nothing will happen. Does your builder have anything in the contract where he has to prepare the surrounding land for a garden? If so then you don't have to worry about anything. If not, then... The only tool necessary is a box blade on the back of a real tractor. You will definitely be able to find someone with that rig. It will take him about 2 hours to run your entire property unless you have lots of obstacles like trees, buried electrical or piping. BE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN TO MAP THE LOCATIONS OF ANYTHING YOUR CONTRACTOR BURIES. And DO NOT let him bury construction material. Almost all of them will do that to some extent or other. Get a trash trailer onsite and make sure everything is cleaned up at the end of the day. Painters will want to clean up their brushes and rollers in the yard. Go ahead and let them do that. It really does not seem to harm the soil or plants. I also agree that 2.5 acres of grass is too much. I have a 1-acre lot out in the country and having half of that in grass is a LOT of grass. Start shopping now for riding mowers. If there is a guy in town who repairs them, ask him for advice on which ones need the fewest repairs. What are the garden restrictions you have to adhere to? Does the entire place need to be landscaped? Can you have a small orchard of citrus or nut trees? A rose garden? A statue garden? A gazebo? I have a long list of garden alternatives to grass but need to see the restrictions. Where are you located? Easton, MD (wild guess) Assuming you are in MD, then I would start researching Kentucky bluegrass as an ultimate turf type. I like it because it is very dense, spreads by itself, and never needs to be reseeded. It takes very well to organic fertilizer and does not need copious amounts. Still, if you want it to be extraordinarily nice, copious amounts or organics will do that for you. The drawback to KBG is that it will turn brown during the winter if it gets too cold. That can be minimized to a few weeks with some effort on your part, but it can be done by normal people without special equipment. The other popular grass for your area is fescue. These do not spread quickly and should be reseeded in the thin spots every fall. The fescues do remain green throughout the year so many people mix fescue with KBG to get the best of both grass types. It sounds like you will be moving in and doing grass no earlier than next summer. That could be perfect. If you will be putting sod down, that is good timing (not great but good). If you are going to seed, then the heat of summer is a really bad time to do that. I would propose waiting until late August for seed. For a first step in seeding, once the land was prepped with the box blade, cover the (small??) area you want in grass with a load of mulch until late August. If your construction goes like most, you might not be moving in until then anyway. Then you won't be needing the mulch and can go straight to seed. What an adventure! Glad you wrote in now rather than writing in July to say you just seeded and nothing happened. I would suggest keeping an eye on this forum and others during the spring and getting a feel for the general nature of the issues. Lawn care is very easy if you simply water and mow correctly. With proper watering and mowing you should not need herbicides, preemergents, insecticides, or fungicides. Watch and learn. Repetition helps you learn.

This looks like severe magnesium deficiency to me. The chlorosis begins at or near the leaf edge and progresses inward between the primary and secondary veins. Some green color remains along the main veins and the chlorotic area may become almost creamy-white. The remaining green tissue surrounding the main veins is best described as a "Christmas tree pattern." The chlorotic margins can become necrotic and turn brown as the deficiency becomes more advanced. You can use an all-purpose fertilizer that has magnesium as a micronutrient. Broadcast over the rootzone and water in well. Use the recommended amount from the product label - no more. Be sure to check your irrigation schedule. You want to water deeply, but not too often. Its possible that you are leaching away nutrients from the soil by watering too often. A good schedule would be to irrigate once every 10 days this time of year, increasing to once a week in summer. The trick is to apply a generous amount of water allowing the soil to dry a bit in-between. A tree the size of yours (I'm guessing it has a 6 foot wide canopy) would probably need about 25 gallons each time you water. Don't water right next to the trunk. Instead place your emitters at the edge of the branches - that's where the feeder roots are. Its also a good idea to remove the stake that is right next to the trunk. The tree doesn't need it and it can rub on the trunk and branches creating wounds. Good luck.

Welcome to organic lawn care (not the forum but the concept)! We'll need a little more information about your situation but a lot of modern theory behind it applies almost universally. Compost is not the ultimate solution anymore. It never was but nobody knew any better. King Compost was the idea of Rodale and those who followed him up until the early 2000s. In the 1990s there was DNA research on the soil that revealed the secret to why organic fertilizer worked and compost had only limited value. The secret is microbes - tens of thousands of them. Prior to that revelation it was believed there might have been tens of microbes living in the soil. Tens of thousands opened up so many concepts of interdependent food chains that the global food chain in the soil was named the soil food web. It is the soil food web that creates plant food, plant medicines, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and really everything that happens inside the gut of a higher order species of animals. Then the solution to making organic gardening work became food instead of compost. Compost has no food value left in it. Food is all food. The food that we use is made from cereal grain sources and other nuts, beans, and plant materials high in protein. If you look at a bag of commercially bagged organic fertilizer you'll see corn, wheat, alfalfa, soy, flax, cottonseed, feather meal, and some animal byproducts. Commercially bagged fertilizer costs about $0.65 per pound in quantity. However, if you visit your local feed store you'll find the same materials in 50-pound sacks for something like $0.30 per pound. The cost used to be more like $0.06 per pound but that is certainly changing. In any case what most of us do is buy bagged alfalfa pellets or soy bean meal at the feed store. The application rate is 20 pounds per 1,000 to start. You can go up to 50 or 60 pounds per thousand if you have the budget for it. Most don't. Red thread and rust are two fungal diseases that will not be touched by corn meal. I've never had those but I have been reading this and other forums for about 10 years and that is the combined intelligence from the readers here. For other fungal diseases, as kimmsr said a large number of readers/writers here have had success with ordinary corn meal applied at 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet to eradicate an existing disease. Having said that, many also report that it has not worked for them. What I know is that I would not have a lawn at all were it not for corn meal. I'm a strong advocate for it, but not for red thread or rust. Your soil is not sterile. It is unfed. As soon as you feed it with real feed, it will respond with an unbelievable flush or dark green growth. I'll post a picture to show an example. This photo was posted almost a year ago here on Gardenweb. It is mrmumbles zoysia lawn. He applied alfalfa pellets in May and took the picture in June. As I recall there was no compost involved. His story was similar to yours - years of chemicals and a switch to organics. I believe this was a test. Many people are skeptical and do a similar test using dry dog food (a great source of protein). Most do not post the pictures, though.