“Less Lawn” is the shorthand for a new trend in gardening that started in the arid West and is coming East, fast.  (Lord knows the Lawn Reform Coalition is doing everything it can to spread the word.)

And one of the most promising groups of plants to create lawn-like sweeps of short plants that can replace turfgrass is the genus Carex.   Carexes are plants commonly thought to be grasses – because they look like ornamental grasses – but technically they’re sedges, not grasses.  (And don’t ask me the botanical difference between grasses and sedges.)

I’ve been growing Carexes for 25 or so years and made sure I thought some with me when I moved because they’re such a help in filling in a new garden.

Above, two of the larger Carexes help fill in a sunny border in my former garden.

But look how well they do (above) in the shade of a deck.  I also used them in my full-shade woodland garden.  They don’t spread, but establish larger and larger clumps that can be divided many times, as I’ve done over the years.

Most Carexes stay nice and low, like Liriope.  Above is Carex morrowii at the Scott Arboretum, where it’s being used as a groundcover on a shady slope in the fall.  It’s also happy in full sun and best of all,  it’s evergreen!  On the right is a variegated version of Carex morrowii that I’ve grown for years, also.

So for shady spots where turfgrass struggles to survive, try Carex.  Options include Carex pensylvanica (Pennsylvania Sedge) that’s native to our region.

One limiting factor to using Carexes instead of turfgrass is that they can’t take foot traffic, so put them where they won’t be walked on OR just create a foot path through them.

Below is are just two of the Carexes on offer in the Perennials Department of our Beltsville location.

“Less Lawn” Show and Tell

And to learn more about lawn reduction – great design ideas and alternative plants – come to Greenbelt tomorrow nite!  Details below.

Posted by Susan Harris.

Carol with some Behnkes Best grass seed.

Horticulturist Carol Allen knows about lawns – in a former job she had to deal with millions of visitors trampling the National Mall, which fortunately none of us have to contend with.  And NOW is the best time to fertilize and seed your lawns, so the audience for Carol’s talk at Behnkes was listening carefully and had lots of questions. Here’s Carol’s advice for fall lawn care.

Weed Control
Actually the best time to start your fall lawn care process was last month, but don’t worry – there’s still time if you get to it.   Optimally, like next year, you’ll spend some time in August getting rid of your lawn weeds, so the weedy spots will be bare, ready to receive new seed.

Perennial weeds may need more than one application of a liquid herbicide – or just hand-pull them.  Carol says liquid products give better weed-leaf coverage and are more effective than the granular types.  They also act faster, and speed is what’s needed now – especially if you’re doing the weed control in September.

Annual weeds, too, can be removed by digging or by using an herbicide, though generally Carol recommends using as little of these products as possible, and she’s pretty darn organic-only herself.  She doesn’t aim for golfcourse-perfect lawns – they require massive amounts of chemicals ARE they’re a lot of work to create and maintain.

Roundup is a nonselective weedkiller, which means it kills whatever it touches.  It can be used in a total re-do when you have to kill everything, then start over, but NOT when you’re keeping any of your existing turfgrass.  Even if you’re really careful, the neighboring grass blades will be killed -  don’t learn that the hard way.

Renovate or Start over?

Lovely lawn, despite the geese!

In making this decision, use the 40-60 rule.  Namely, if you have at least 40 percent coverage with healthy turfgrass, it’s fixable. If not, kill what’s there and start over with a new lawn.  The new lawn may take two seasons to fill in completely and you will have a more difficult time controlling weeds, so renovate not replace, if you can.

Turf in Part-Shade

Turfgrasses love and in fact are dependent on sun, so if you choose a grass seed for sun, know that that means FULL sun.  “Shade-tolerant” grass types love the sun, but are tolerant of a little shade.  Too much shade combined with a little drought spells drying, patchy turf.  (Kinda discouraging for anyone with shade over lawn, huh?)  So really notice how much sun your lawn gets before choosing between the two types or the result is too much shade, you might just give up and grow something that’s NOT stressed by shade.  Four to six hours of afternoon sun is required to produce an adequate lawn, so count the hours yours gets and get real.  For sites that get only 3-4 hours a day, try a blend just for shade – and if it fares poorly, time to look for an alternative.

One short-term trick for improving your too-shady lawn if you have an event coming up and you’d like the place to look its best is to sow annual or perennial rye.   In two weeks it’ll look great; a few weeks later the rye will have died but by then, your event will be over.

Best Turf Type for our Area

The best-adapted popular cool-season turf type for the Mid-Atlantic is tall fescue, which is what’s in the local brand Behnke Best.  (Carol recommends the University of Maryland for details about the various trials they’ve done demonstrating the superior performance of tall fescue but in a nutshell, tall fescues give a fine blade that’s resistant to many turf problems.)  The Shade blend of seed has a high percentage of hard fescues, which are more shade-tolerant but less tolerant of traffic, so they aren’t used on soccer fields (which thankfully aren’t shaded, so they don’t need shade blends, anyway).

Soil Prep

If your soil has been heavily compacted and you have a lot of turf to treat, definitely rent a core aerator to open it up.  If your soil is moderately compacted, or just a spot or two are badly compacted – maybe the corner everyone cuts across rather than staying on the sidewalk – you can just use a spading fork.  Plunge it repeatedly in the ground, wiggle it back and forth a bit, and you’ve opened up holes 3-4 inches deep that are needed to correct compaction.  Make a set of holes every few inches.

Either way you’ve created those 3-4-inch-deep holes in your soil, then top dress with a good compost product like Leafgro, so that it fills those holes.  In fact, a nice one-quarter to three-eight-inch layer of Leafgro on top of the entire lawn is a great way to both feed your lawn and to improve the soil structure.  Whether it’s needed every year or every two or three years depends on how compacted the soil is and other stress factors.

Sowing the Seed

Your guide to coverage should be to achieve the “salt and pepper on eggs” look, not a “sand on a beach” look.

Follow the instructions on the bag and remember that for overseeding an existing lawn, apply one-half the thickness recommended for new lawns.   You’ll want thicker coverage in barer spots, of course.

After sowing, do a light watering by hand (best) or with a sprinkler (using the sprinkler only briefly).  Just the surface needs to be wet, about one-fourth inch deep.  Repeat this for the first 7-10 days – or in severe heat, longer.  After the new grass blades have some roots and are a couple of inches tall (a couple of weeks or more), switch to deeper watering – an inch per week, or more in severe heat.

Raking the New Lawn

So, what if your new grass is being smothered by fallen leaves from the nearby oaks?  And smother exactly what will happen, so get them off the new grass – but not by raking.  This is a job for your leafblower, and a small electric one will do the job just fine.

So, if you have leaves anywhere near your lawn, the fallen-leaf problem is another reason to seed early – like this week – rather than waiting until later in the fall when the leaves are dropping like crazy.

Feeding your Lawn

Fall is the perfect time to feed your lawn because it’s when the nutrients go to root growth, not the fast top-growth that feeding would produce in the spring (which only causes you to have to mow more frequently).  Carol recommends just one application of fertilizer every fall, and in some situations applying a top-dressing of Leafgro is an adequate substitute.  It all depends on how much improvement your lawn needs.

If you’ve applied grass seed, wait until the new grass blades are 1-2″ tall before applying fertilizer or apply fertilizer before you seed.

Which to use?  Well, to make sure we don’t pollute the Bay and kill the crabs there (among other critters), Maryland’s legislature has wisely limited the amount of phosphorus in regular lawn fertilizer.  “Starter” fertilizers are allowed to have more phosphorus because new lawns really need the extra phosphorus; for older lawns, our soils have plenty of phosphorus already.

Carol’s favorite lawn fertilizer is Espoma’s Lawn Organic lawn Food, which is 40% water-insoluble nitrogen (WIN). That percentage is the all-important info to look at on any fertilizer label, she says, because it’s the water-soluble nutrients that can quickly run off into the Bay and that number needs to be low.   High-WIN products tend to be more expensive, but remember, they’re less likely to hurt the Bay, and also be wasted, which lessens the cost-savings.

Another great all-organic product that’s high-WIN is Milorganite.

You can apply lawn fertilizers up until mid-October.

For more information, Carol recommends these articles from the University of Maryland:

• Lawn Establishment, Renovation and Overseeding
• Fertilizing Facts for Home Lawns

Posted by  Susan Harris.

Does your lawn look something like this sad, ugly patch of the National Mall?  It’s probably not this bad, since you don’t have hundreds of thousands of visitors trampling over it every year, not to mention whole tents pitched on it for weeks in the summer, but most DC-area homeowners have lawn issues, let’s say.  And despite advertisements everywhere in the spring telling us to fix the lawn then, NOW is the right time to do it.

So give your yourself and your lawn a break and come to one of our free seminars this weekend to hear an actual expert – horticulturist Carol Allen – explain how to fix your lawn in ways that don’t bust the bank or hurt the environment, either.  Carol will answer all your questions, too.

Below are the details and the blurb in our Events list.

Locations, Dates and Times:
Beltsville Store, Saturday, September 1 at 11:00 a.m.
Potomac Store, Sunday, September 2 at 1:00 p.m.
Speaker:  Carol Allen, horticulturist
Cost: FREE

Lawns are not natural. It wasn’t that long ago that only kings and the aristocracy could stride across manicured lawns. But somewhere around the upward climb of the middle class, lawns became the “everyman’s burden.” There’s mowing, weeding, fertilizing, watering and keeping an eagle eye out for problems. However, with a little planning and some inside tips from Carol, you could become a lawn pro.  For bluegrass/tall fescue lawns, fall is the best time to start learning.  Be the King of your grassy domain.

National Mall photo credit.

Between now and the end of October is the best time to feed your lawn – which needs a yearly application of Nitrogen or it’ll keep getting thinner and weedier.  (Why?  Because turfgrasses are not sustainable plants, y’all!  They’re one of the very few garden plants that really, really needs to be fed.)  Typical cool-season grasses in our area need 2 pounds of added Nitrogen each year per 1,000 square feet, some of which you can give your lawn by leaving grass clippings on the lawn (about a half-pound of Nitrogen per year), but that’s not nearly enough.

It’s best to apply lawn fertilizer in two applications – one in September and one in October – which is exactly what’s recommended by Maryland’s Dept of Agriculture, the agency charged with protecting the Chesapeake Bay and our rivers from pollution by fertilizer.

If your lawn really needs rejuvenating, then rent a core aerator and use it first, before applying the fertilizer

I asked the experts in Behnkes’ Garden Pharmacy Department to name their personal favorites among all the lawn fertilizers on offer, and here they are:

• For the budget-conscious, they recommend the Turf Trust slow-release synthetic fertilizer – because it’s local, so the product and their recommendations for application are geared to the weird Mid-Atlantic region.  (Our region is called the transition zone, where neither cool-season nor warm-season grasses are ideal.  Continent-wide generalizations don’t work here)  And because it’s formulated to be released slowly, it won’t run off into our waterways the next time there’s a heavy rain.   They also like the added micronutrients provided by Turf Trust, compared to other brands.
• Another fertilizer for the budget-conscious is Espoma Lawn Food, which combines poultry manure and urea.
• Among the all-organic fertilizers, Bob’s favorite is Espoma Organic, which is a poultry-based product.  (Espoma’s also a Mid-Atlantic company)

Posted by Susan Harris.

by Susan Harris

We’re fast approaching that time of year – September 1 through mid-October – when most homeowners should be busily tending to their lawns, giving them the food and overseeding that they need.   Sure, it’s spring when lots of us notice that our lawns are thin and weedy but for many reasons, early fall is the best time to do something about it.  And don’t go thinking turfgrasses can just go on living indefinitely with no help from you because without added Nitrogen, they become thinner and weedier each year.   Heck, even WITH fertilizing, most lawns don’t look as good as we’d like  them to because they also need overseeding  – and that’s the one garden chore that’s the MOST needed and the MOST neglected.  But the good news is that it’s cheap and easy, and makes a big difference.

Now it’s true that lawns are under attack these days – as resource-wasting and polluting – and I sympathize, but let’s be realistic. There’s nothing better for playing on, and most homeowners will continue to have lawn.  And let’s be fair, too – lawns don’t HAVE to be resource-wasting and polluting.  I founded the national Lawn Reform Coalition of environmental communicators from across the U.S. and our goal is to spread the word about how to have less lawn but also – note! – how to have an earth-friendly lawn.  So, no lawn-bashing here, just sensible answers about how to grow it.

That’s what you’ll find on the Behnkes website – five brand-new articles about earth-friendly lawns and lawn care.  I compiled them based on advice from the University of Maryland, Behnkes’ own experts, and my own research over the years.

Here’s what you’ll find:

Earth-Friendly Lawn Care Throughout the Year is arranged by season to make it super-easy to know what to do, when.  You can refer to this article each season, or if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll be reminded when the time is right.

Earth-Friendly Lawn Care  Basics covers each topic at length – feeding, mowing, seed choice, weeds, etc.

How to Repair Bare Spots in your Lawn covers bare spots from any cause, including  but not limited to dog-pee.

How to Start a New Lawn is what you’ll need to know if you’re putting in a lawn where there used to be something else, or if your lawn is so bad (50 % coverage or less) that you’re better off starting from scratch.

How to Overseed your Lawn is what almost everyone should be doing!  Okay, if you do it regularly (at least every other year) you don’t need to read this but for the rest of you, and you know who you are, this is the key to filling in that weak, weed-prone lawn that you’re feeling embarrassed about.

Dog photo credit.