I’m surprised I haven’t written anything in here before about one of my latest hobbies, lawn care. This weekend I’ve done a fair bit of work on our lawns.

It all started about 3 months ago, when I was attempting to access the washing line. A quick (and nasty!) cost/benefit analysis decided that I would tip-toe through the bindii-eye prickle weeds to minimise the impact of hundred of tiny, small, sharp, and painful stings of prickles on bare feet. Soon realising this was not a sustainable action, I continued to spend approximately 40 hours hand-weeding 80 squared metres of lawn. It didn’t stop here, as I then continued to fine-comb remove all this prickly weed until I was sure I have every last seed. I then decided to eliminate the next worst weed, kikuya lawn. Those two weeds took a couple months to work on, involving multiples poisons and recovery times. I’ve since also eliminated clover, and tom-thumb, and ALMOST got rid of oxalysis.

The trouble started when I went on the first holiday. I left the lawn in the fate of the lawns owners (even though it’s widely accepted as *MY* lawn ). I can’t remember what happened to the lawn in the first holiday I went on for several weeks, but it did involve a reasonably amount of hand-weeding summer weeds when I returned. This was dealt with in minimal time.

However, I had just applied pot-ash the day before I left for the second time for a couple weeks, and this burnt most of the green stuff that wasn’t Santa-Ana cooch lawn. (Santa-Ana is the single desirable lawn in the yard, and widely accepted until recently as the best lawn available in Adelaide).

With many brown patches where Santa-Ana wasn’t originally, raw dirt was then exposed, which has allowed for a large populus of summer-weeds. I don’t know what any of these summer weeds are called, but they multiply massively with water – hence why I call them water weeds.

That is a brief history of my lawn. I have now (this weekend) with my dad planted tufts of Windsor Green variety of cooch (very similar to Santa-Ana) along where the shade seems to mostly exist, since this new variety is supposably much more hardy in sun and in shade. We also planted Santa-Ana where there is no shade. The reason for the two varieties now is because we had bought it with my brother who recently bought bulk Windsor Green, and we used his Windsor Green leftovers. We weren’t going to use it originally, and hence ordered some Santa-Ana, but when we saw how similar it looked figured it doesn’t look much different, and so we now have no problem having it mixed up with the Santa-Ana. Hopefully these tufts will grow over the entire shady half of the lawn by next summer. When this happens, weed control with pure cooch (whether it be Santa-Ana or Windsor Green) should be so much easier, since you can just use a cover spray with a concentration specific to cooch lawns.

If anyone reading this would like more information about lawn care for Adelaide conditions, and advice on weed control or whatever, leave a comment saying what you’d like to know more about and I’ll write lots more, but I’ve really learnt too much and had too many experiences to write about all of it (which is why I have written about it till now!) If you can provide me a link to lawn weeds in Adelaide, or Australia in general, or even in the world, this is something I’ve much desired, so I can find out the best course of action of eradicating particular varieties of weeds.

I’m excited to see how this new lawn goes, and look forward to displaying photos of our beautiful bowling green within a year!

I’ve also got roped into helping Mum with some volunteer gardening at Eden Park (which is a heritage listed garden where I went to school) getting read for the Open Garden Scheme exhibition or something, in a few weeks time. My job was to drain the pond and fountain, scrub off all the algae, and fill it up again. It didn’t take too much to drain it and fill it up, nor did it take much to scrub the algae down, but holy crap! Getting the yuck off the bottom of the pond was really annoyingly difficult! But it’s done now, and looking schmick!