Off Boulevard

We have grass!

And we have weeds…

What the what?!  The ironic part is that I’ve never seen these weeds before.  We’re hoping the grass will eventually choke out the weeds and we spread a second round of grass seed this week to take advantage of the warm weather we’ve been having.  Hopefully Frankenstorm doesn’t wash it all away!

When we last left our quest for a lawn made of actual grass, we had sent a soil sample to be analyzed and then limed our lawn (twice) to improve the soil.  The good new is that we’re making progress towards our goal.  The bad news is that our yard looked like this the last couple weeks -

Not a good look.  What’s worse is that at this point I wish we could go back to that because after this weekend the yard now looks like this -

Horrible.  It’s a huge pile of mud littered with dead grass bits.  So how did we get here?  It all started with a little weed extermination about four weeks ago.  In our first attempt we used a product that kills weeds but spares the grass.  I think we knew deep down it wouldn’t work, but were just curious to see if we actually had some grass hiding somewhere.  In the end it didn’t work on anything and the weeds stared back at us in defiance.   After consulting with our good friends at Southern States, which we should have done from the start, we tried round two with a weed and grass killer.

They told us summer weeds are the hardest to kill so you have to use a tougher product.  And oh, it did the trick.  Guess where our lawn ends and our neighbors starts -

It killed everything except for this random chive-like plant which may be approaching cockroach status on the survival scale -

So now we had a dead lawn taupe that needed to be removed.  We rented a power thatcher to help speed things along… and it was awesome (minus the hours of raking afterwards).

The final step in prepping our lawn for grass seed was to aerate.  Again we turned to some machinery to help us with that, but this time things didn’t go so smoothly.

Let’s just say you shouldn’t aerate after it rains.  I thought we were going to have to buy the aerator after how much mud we got stuck in it.  But in the end, we FINALLY spread the grass seed that will hopefully turn into a nice green lawn that Livie can run around in next spring!

And we’re mowing…again.

And we’re liming…again.

And we’re watering…again.

Next week, mass extermination of weeds!

Muhahahahah!

For two years we’ve been patiently waiting for our neighbors grass to invade our weed infested lawn.  It’s not looking promising.  So a couple weeks ago Brian and I sent in a soil sample to the Virginia Cooperative Extension as a starting point in our desperate attempt to grow some grass this fall.  The results are in – we need lime.  We are quickly running out of lawn prep time before we hit prime seeding season, so we hightailed it to Southern States this weekend to get us some lime.  The staff was extremely helpful and walked us through all the steps we needed to take before, during, and after planting the grass seed and exactly when we should do everything (they also have a ton of information on their website).  We found out it was best to do two applications of lime, one now and another in mid August.  We purchased pelleted lime -

Threw it in the spreader -

And are watering, watering, watering as we were instructed to do -

Now we wait until August.

Despite our best efforts, we’re the lawn pariahs of our block.  Our neighbors all have lush, perfectly manicured, regularly watered lawns.  We have weeds.  I don’t mean we have a few weeds here or there trying to invade our grass – we have 0% grass.

On the bright side, we’re really good at growing weeds!  Just look at the variety we have -

We’ve made some weak attempts at growing grass and do a lot of talking about how much we dislike our weeds, but the last straw came this weekend when I was stung by a bee who was hanging out in the “flowers” in our “grass”.  I will not let that little bee die in vain, it’s time to grow some grass!

After doing some research, we learned that one of the most important steps in the grass growing process is to prepare your soil.  From the yard work we’ve done, we knew that ours is pretty full of clay which I’m sure isn’t the most conducive to growing grass.  Off we went to our local cooperative extension to pick up a soil sample kit so we could learn exactly what we needed to do to get our soil to love and to hold the grass we plan on planting in the fall.  First, we had to collect the samples.  We picked five random spots from our lawn, taking a sample 2-4 inches deep.

Then we mixed all the samples together in a bucket and poured the mixture in the sample box.

Off the box went to the cooperative extension to be tested for soil pH, P, K, Ca, Mg, Zn, Mn, Cu, Fe, B, and estimated CEC (don’t ask me what half of those things are) and in a week or so we’ll get a recommendation of what to do next!