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!
Entries
Entries
Ohh the dreaded brown patches .. lol, imagine how difficult it is to keep those from creeping up in our desert oasis here in Arizona? It def takes a lot of hard work and careful preperation.. Don’t forget to post those new photos of your New lawn! I want to see how it turns out.
I like cutting the grass to its just when it get 100 degrees I say this sucks.
What a marvelous story! If you’re in Jacksonville give us a call and we’ll be glad to help out!
Jacksonville Florida Lawn Care
11713 Marco Beach Dr.
Jacksonville, FL 32224
(904) 240-4117
Hi Daniel,
I’m flattered that you’ve asked me!
It sounds like you’re giving it all the love. I recall a lawn expert once telling me that couch lawn doesn’t grow until it reaches something like either 21 or 24 degrees ambient temperature, so I’m not surprised that you have many brown blades at the moment. I was thinking you may have the dreaded lawn beetle when I read about your browning, although you also mentioned the roots are in good condition so it doesn’t sound like the likely cause of the browning. A good test for lawn beetles though is if you can grab a wad of dead grass with two fingers and pull it out of the lawn, then you have lawn beetles eating the roots.
If you have just removed lots of weeds, the lawn could be having to have competed against various weeds throughout winter in a time that couch struggles to grow by itself anyway. When spring time comes, you could try using a cover spray to kill off weeds, which will get all the little tiny ones before you even really notice them. I’ve had much success with Munns B6 (Munn’s is my local lawn specialty store in Adelaide), which you can get from Munn’s store or from some selected stores. I also had to use a specific Winter Grass cover spray. Winter Grass grows a lot during winter, but dies off at the end of winter. When using cover sprays it’s best to do it a few days or a week after fertilising, when the lawn itself is at its strongest.
The only other tip I have that might be of help, is not to scarify until spring, and also a week or so after fertilising, so that way it can bounce right back. It may also help to talk to a specialist lawn store (such as Munn’s, although there might be others?) about which fertiliser to use before scarifying.
One other tip is that there are many fertilisers out there, all with different NPK ratios. Some benefit root growth, some benefit foliage growth. Maybe have a look at what fertiliser you’ve used during the winter, and perhaps you’ve been using a root growth fertiliser when you really just want a foliage growth fertiliser to get you through the winter?
Hope this helps! In 2008 my fiance and I moved into a townhouse, and now I no longer have any lawn. It is a dream to move into our next house and have 4 kids and 200m^2 of lawn!
Oh one other thing, I’ve found in the past if you take a spade of lawn down to Munn’s, they’ll have a look at it for you, maybe even test the soil, and give you some real expert advice.
Cheers,
Tom
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the interesting read! It sounds like your as obsessive about your lawn as I am except you have more knowledge and I have four crazy boys who just love digging it up in all kinds of creative ways. This is my situation I have santa anna couch about 200m2 of it and I love it. It’s about five years old now and I have done various things to get it back to it’s former glory i.e heaps of fertilizer, using a coring machine, mowing it down on the lowest level etc. I have spent the last 3 days off and on weeding which has it weed free as far as I can tell. When weeding I noticed that there are heaps of dead blades with the occasional green but the roots seem in great condition, so rather than just recore it again I was thinking of de-thatching it or scarifying do you have any suggestions?
Cheers,
Daniel