This may be a bid ..duh..for everyone but I had an interesting experience last week.
First, I will say that my lawn/house is about 4 years old. When the house was first built, the builder put down some average quality St. Augustine which looked fine at the time. As time went on though, dallisgrass invaded our yard, or it might have been there all along due to the quality of grass that we have.
So, with dallisgrass at about 25% of our whole yard, I wanted to try and resod the yard because I was always told that dallisgrass could only be gotten rid of by pulling it out of the ground.
With all of that said, I contacted a recommended sod farmer in the area and asked him what he recommended and what the cost might be to resod the yard. The next day, he and his wife came over and inspected my yard.
My front yard is not so bad as I have been pulling the dallisgrass for sometime and seem to have control of it there, but, the backyard is a whole different story. It looks like a jungle.
When the sod farmer and his wife walked into my backyard, they both got big grins on their faces and the guy started chuckling. Then, he turned to me and seriously said "STOP PUTTING NITROGEN ON THIS YARD!". I was suprised to hear him say that although he was exactly right, I have been keeping the nitrogen coming to the yard about every 3 months.
He said the main thing that the nitrogen was doing was feeding the dallisgrass to the point at which it was now. After that, he said that he was going to lose a few thousand bucks for telling me, but, he said what he recommended was to stop using any fertilizer at all, do not water very much and mow, at least, every three days. Anything I had to do to keep the dallisgrass from getting anywhere close to seeding. He said that he will check back in 3 months and he would wager that the yard would have beautiful improvements in that amount of time, but, if I still wanted to resod at that time, he would do it and make his money.
When he and his wife got ready to leave, I thanked him for his honesty and not trying to take advantage of me, because he could have.
Anyway, I thought it was quite interesting that he said to stop using the nitrogen, it kind of caught me off guard.
Any thoughts anyone? Was he right?
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