Your Backyard Garden

Q. When do you feed a Hydro seeded lawn?

A. After the first time you cut it.

Q. We live in an area that has soil that looks like gravel. Water runs right through it. Can we possibly have a lawn?

A. Sure, you can; you will just have to water a lot more often.

Q. What can you add to sand to make it hold water?

A. Clay, sawdust, or peat moss. Take a plastic gallon jug or two and poke holes in the bottom, fill it with sand, and pour water over it. See how long it takes from the time you pour until it comes out the bottom. Now, add the clay or other material until you lengthen the time to four times the plain sand rate.

Q. Won’t weed killers hurt birds and pets?

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Q. How long do I have to leave the wooden stakes in the sod on the side of a hill?

A. Until you are sure the new roots have a good grip on the soil. Grab a handful of grass the same way your teacher grabbed your hair when you were a kid, and tug gently. If it holds, remove the stakes. Should any slide appear, replace the stakes; if you forget, your lawn mower will let you know.

Q. How many different types of lawn can be planted by sod?

A. All of the blues, bent, fescue, and Timothy rye.I have honestly seen darn near every domestic type of lawn grass applied as sod.

Q. Can I use weed killer to kill the weeds between my sod?

A. You can, but I would caution you to wait until the third mowing and then a week after the first feeding. Let the grass recover from the shock of transplanting before you give it a dose of foul-tasting medicine.

Q. Should I leave the grass clippings on new sod?

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Q. What’s the best type of lawn to grow on clay soil?

A. If you can get that soil loose enough by using garden gypsum at the rate of fifty pounds per one thousand square feet; then any grass seed will grow.

Q. Is there a right time of the day to plant seed?

A. I always try to plant, drill, or broadcast seed after 5 P.M. Plants grow in the dark, so I give them a head start.

Q. Should you spread seed by hand or can you use your lawn spreader?

A. I find that you get better coverage by using a cyclone-type broadcast spreader. If you don’t own one, borrow one. The next spreader you purchase should be this type.

Q. How deep should you plant grass seed?

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Q. Should you add grass seed to an old lawn every year?

A. Only if you’re too darn lazy the rest of the year to feed, dethatch, water, and mow it properly.

Q. Can you plant grass seed where a dog killed the grass or grass died over the winter?

A. Yep! Scratch up the dead grass, say a prayer, soak and refrigerate the new seed, scatter the seed and top dress lightly, pat or tamp down and—voila! New grass!

Q. If grass seed freezes in the garage over the winter, is it still good?

A. Hell, yeah! If it goes to seed in the wild, do you think it builds a new house to keep warm in the winter? It just goes dormant (to sleep); it will wake up in time to give you a good lawn.

Q. How many different kinds of grass seed are there?

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TWO CHEERS FOR GRASS

Not only am I not about to rip up my lawn and put in a meadow or a vegetable plot; a few years ago I ripped out various gardens to put in a lawn.

Not only am I not about to rip up my lawn and put in a meadow or a vegetable plot; a few years ago I ripped out various gardens to put in a lawn.The land behind our house slopes up, over gently rising pasture to a hilltop perhaps a half-mile away; this is our view. When we bought the house, the backyard was so cluttered with gardens—a large, sloppy perennial bed; above it a big vegetable garden, full of weed-choked clumps of asparagus; sprawling beds of raspberries and rhubarb—that you really couldn’t see the view.

Even at its best, in June, when the peonies were in bloom and the vegetable beds newly planted and not yet decimated by woodchucks, it looked like hell.

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A Cottage GARDEN

Rose Moore is a California gardener-writer. Her neighbors were alarmed when she first tore up her front lawn to plant marigolds and eggplants, but over the years they’ve learned to enjoy the changing displays; wheat one year (she threshed it on the driveway), beans the next. She grows vegetables and flowers everywhere on her small property, redoing the entire planting a couple of times a year.

In nineteenth-century America, instead of lawns people would often have small fenced flower gardens in front of their houses. In a memoir, my mother wrote of hearing that in the 1860s, on her great-grandparents’ Maine farm, “there was a big flower garden surrounded by a white picket fence that filled our front yard all the way to the road. Neighbors and strangers would stop to admire the display, and to beg slips for their own gardens.”

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A MEADOW

The trendiest lawn substitute these days is the meadow—or prairie, as some native plant enthusiasts prefer to call it. It turns out, though, that a meadow, which seems like the
simplest, most natural thing in the world, isn’t easily achieved.

If you just stop mowing and let the grass grow, you will not get a meadow; what you’ll get after several generations of weeds and brambles, is a forest. Meadows take work.

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