Mon 30 Aug 2010

Lawn Care Virginia Beach: DIY or DIE

Posted by david under General Lawn Care
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Okay, so why a site called Lawn Care Virginia Beach and why should you listen to what I have to say?

Well, first of all, I do not own a lawn care company so this site was designed to help a typical homeowner make informed decisions when it comes to the care of their lawns and not as a platform for businesses looking for, well, new business so the information here is impartial.

Note:  I do have experience with hiring a professional lawn care company so if that is what you are looking for this site will be helpful, and vital actually, to you as well.

Now, hopefully when you went online to try and figure out one of the many issues you may be having with you lawn, you typed in something like Lawn Care Virginia Beach, and, if I designed this site correctly, I should have been one of the first results you found.

… and lucky for you, you have!

I’m a typical homeowner who has spent the last two years trying to establish a healthy beautiful lawn but with limited and mixed results at best.

I have been fighting an endless battle against weeds, insects, heat and drought problems, fertilizing issues, poor soil conditions and basically having one of the worst lawns in the neighborhood… Very frustrating!

To be fair to myself I must say here that I do live out in Pungo and I am surrounded by fields that when not planted with corn or soybeans, hosts every imaginable type of weed native to the Virginia Beach area.

These weeds of course love to come visiting and although my yard can barely sustain a single blade of grass it seems to have just the right amount of clay and pH level for weeds!

Another problem that I face that most homeowners don’t is the fact that my yard actually used to be a place where farm tractors were parked and has several inches of crusher run and concrete beneath the 2-3″ of soil that was later trucked in.

I have to water constantly in the summer or the area dries out very quickly.

Now, as luck would have it, this past year I had the good fortune of working full time from home and decided to use the opportunity of being just a few steps from my troubled lawn to make drastic changes and finally get the beautiful turfgrass and landscaping my neighbors would be envious of.

So, with my eye on the prize of having a golf course like front yard, I trucked in more topsoil and put in an underground sprinkler system and then put down starter fertilizer and planted drought tolerant grass seed and then watered it like a good steward, and once it came up did the whole preemergence herbicide deal to stop crab grass and other weed infestations but this only seemed to encourage their growth!

I fought dandelions and buttercups and some type of leafy weed I have yet to identify but that has now taken permenant residence in the one area of my yard that had actually always looked pretty good… somehow in trying to help I have managed to make my weed problem worse!

Of course I figured that me having an automatic sprinkler system meant I should water my lawn everyday, which I needed to do in the area where the soil layed on top of concrete but  later found out was a mistake to do in “normal” areas of my lawn.

I also cut the grass too short and at the wrong time of day so the lawn, much like my wife when she saw the bill for all this, became completely stressed out!

I now have some moss growth and fungus in some areas while others are all patchy and filled with grass clippings I was instructed to leave down that have now created a 2 inch thick thatch work that has smothered my grass.

My pesky neighbor said I should dethatch and core aerate the soil but I can’t go deep enough because of the concrete just below the surface.  The machine I rented to remove the plugs kept smacking into the hard surface below and I did not want to damage it.

I ended up using a drill to try and poke holes in the soil… the neighbors got a real laugh out of that one!

Midway through the summer I decided to try and brush up on my soil chemistry and studied all the components that make up healthy soil like pH levels, potassium, nitrogen and how to use synthetic chemicals, as well as safe organic ones, to attain the desired amounts of each vital nutrient in my lawn.

I quickly abandoned the idea of trying t0 understand just exactly what my yard needed after continued bouts of headaches and blurred vision and turned to the shrubs, flower beds and ornamental areas of the yard to see if I could get better results there.

Of course with my aggressive nature I pruned to aggressively, weed whacked much to close to some fragile dogwood trees and basically over fertilized the flowers my wife had planted a few years earlier, which, oddly enough, were doing just fine without any help from me but were now in various states of distress.

Giving up on that I turned to the vegetable garden I had tried to grow the past spring.  I had fenced off an area and planted all kinds of really cool vegetables.  Insects and a local rabbit had eaten most of what I had planted and the 3 foot high weeds had strangled the rest.

Completely frustrated and overwhelmed, I went to the hardware store and bought a bottle of concentrated weed and grass killer, intent on killing off what remained of the lawn, the gardens and my vegetable patch and starting all over.

I pulled into the driveway and my wife, having witnessed the painful death of her beautiful flowers,  had gone behind my back and called out a local Virgina Beach lawn care company whose technicians were now busy analyzing my lawn and furiously scratching notes on their clipboard… this could not be good!

Tucking my tail between my legs and acknowledging my wife’s intense warning glare, I walked up to one of the guys and asked him how things were going, fighting the temptation to physically remove him from my property!

Thankfully he had obvious experience with wives not knowing their place and did not make fun of my attempts at professional lawn care, saying I had just about gotten it right,  but quickly asked if he could point out a few areas of concern and offer his advice.

So, fast forward a bit and I now have a pretty decent looking lawn. I do much of the weekly yard maintenance work myself (cutting, weed eating, trimming) but I leave the chemistry and the applying of all those magical concoctions that keep weeds at bay and the grass green to the pros.

This site will chronicle all the mistakes I made and all the great advice I have been given by the company I am now happy my wife hired.

Hopefully as this site, Lawn Care Virginia Beach continues to grow, you will be able to decide what you can handle and what is best left to the professionals when it comes to proper lawn care.

I will recommend the one company who we have used and are very happy with in case you find yourself as I was awhile back… frustrated, defeated and with a 20 gallon sprayer in hand, filled with weed and grass killer, ready to end it all!

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Mon 30 Aug 2010

Summer Lawn Care Tips For Those With Green Thumbs

Posted by david under Summer Lawn Care
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If you are the DIY type that has good success with growing things and gluing things and assembling things, then maybe doing your own lawncare is a good idea.  You can build a bird feeder too to rub it in when you are done.  lol

Me?  Well, I can maintain things once they are in place, like my lawn but had to go to the pros to get some good advice and a helping hand… But, here is an article that can be helpful if you want to go it alone.

Summer Lawn Care Tips

By Josh Gray

Summer is just around the corner, and your lawn could probably use a little maintenance before the summer season of backyard BBQs and swimming in the pool. So what are you doing now to get your lawn ready? Lawn care is often feared as a difficult and time intensive process, but with a few guidelines and tips, you can easily have a healthy green lawn in time for the first backyard party of the season.

First of all, if you can spare a minute of your time, don’t hire a lawn care “specialist” or professional landscaper. Buying your own lawn care products is cheap and easy, with hundreds of vendors offering products online and in Do-It-Yourself stores. A wide variety of products such as weed controllers to fertilizers can be found online, and usually can be found at reasonable prices, especially when you do a little online coupon searching.

Starting off on the right foot is important to reviving your lawn after winter. Fertilizer is the key to ensuring strong healthy growth of the grass in your yard. Fertilizing the grass does more than just make it green. Of course it will make it grow too, but lot’s of things happen when you fertilize. Fertilizer makes the seed germinate faster, and get started out of the ground. After the grass has a good start fertilizer will make the grass get thicker and send off beneficial chemicals like Rhizomes, Stolons, and Tillers all making the grass thicker and healthier.

What most people want to know about fertilizing is – how much and when? Typically, you want to fertilize 4 times each season, spread 60 days apart. Start in early spring approximately 30 days before the growing season begins in your area, continuing through the growing season until fall. Spring fertilizing gets the grass off to a fast start giving you that rich green color everyone wants. A word of warning though, don’t use too much fertilizer, follow the listed guidelines on the bag.

Mowing is the most misunderstood part of lawn care, and the most often incorrectly performed part of lawn care. Far too many people will set their mowers too low or “scalp” the lawn. How many times have you spent time mowing your grass in hopes of a beautiful result only to end up with brown spots? Cutting too much off the top leads to thinned out grass, and shallow root systems.

Now once you have achieved the perfect lawn, you must do regular maintenance to prevent it from going back to being a pasture. Spend a little time and money and keep it watered and you will keep the lush grass you spent your hard earned money and time on. The ideal way to water your lawn is with an Automatic Underground Sprinkler System. This way the watering is done every day that it needs it, you don’t have to drag hoses, you don’t waste water from over watering, and you get all of the lawn watered, not just where you happen to set the sprinkler. If you implement this type of sprinkler system, make sure to water shrubbery and annuals separate from the lawn. If you applied the same amount of water on your landscape as gets put on the lawn you would surely kill some plants from over watering.

Now that you’re ready to care for your lawn, you’ll need to get your supplies. Lawn care products can be found at many local gardening centers, or through many online merchants. Buying gardening supplies online is growing in popularity, and made even more economical by online coupons and discounts. For coupons on everything from fertilizers to lawn tools and equipment, check out http://www.CouponChief.com and easily save yourself some big bucks. Spend the extra cash on your first big BBQ of the summer and invite all your neighbors over to drool over your well manicured, lush green lawn.

Josh Gray, President of UC San Diego’s Gardens Club, is a consultant to CouponChief.com. This online coupon website provides free coupons and discount codes to many favorite gardening websites on their home and garden coupons page.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Josh_Gray

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Mon 30 Aug 2010

Paint Your Grass Green

Posted by david under Interesting Lawn Care Facts
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Here at Lawn Care Virginia Beach, we can’t stress enough how important it is to keep your sense of humor when it comes to lawn care.

My wife would say I do not practace what I preach but I do laugh a lot “after” the fact and things usually work out okay if you keep a cool head… Here is an example.

The first year I tried to fix my lawn I really messed it up bad!

I had weeds everywhere! 

Now, my lawn is really two seperate lawns: the one right in front of the house and the one on the other side of the driveway leading to the edge of our poroperty.  I have an acre of land and about a third of that makes up these two sections.

The lawn in front of the house has always been pretty nice until I introduced weeds into it by mistake… More about that in a later post!

The other side has always given me trouble because it it is mixed match of different grasses and has a very thin layer of soil over top of concrete and the grass dies when it gets hot and doesn’t rain in a few days.

I love, or loved, the side that was always green and lush in the summer and think it is some type of Bermuda grass or St. Augustine… a very warm weather grass that dies off in the winter… which I have always hated.

It is so pretty in the summer and brown and ugly in the winter… So last year I painted it!

Yep, they actually make a paint that you can buy and mix with water to spray on your lawn and it looks almost like the real thing.  There are testimonials of this stuff fooling the city and even home owner’s associations!

Also, when I had to start completely over and kill off the grass on the other side I painted it as well.  This was actually the side I did first to test the product out because I knew I would be bringing in dirt to add to the thickness of the soil base and was not worried if it looked bad.

It did NOT look bad.  In fact, I could not wait for the good grass to die out and the other side that winter so I could paint my lawn!

The paint lasted about 3 months but was fading about two months in and could have been reapplied at that time.  It cost about $150 or so for each application which isn’t to bad I suppose for about 6 months of nice green grass when it is usually brown.

It is non-toxic and does not affect future growth either… really cool stuff and something I wanted to share with you all.

Here is where you can more information and order the paint:

Lawn Paint

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