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I moved into a rental house with a badly neglected yard. It was once a Bermuda lawn, although St Augustine is creeping in from neighboring yards. At least 50% of the back yard is currently a solid bed of Lespedeza, with guest appearances by dollarweed, crabgrass, and a few other things I haven't identified yet. I told myself I was just going to mow what was given to me since the owners clearly DGAF (but they want me to water 3x weekly lmao), but red wasps seem drawn to the Lespedeza in droves and I've got a 3 year old who loves to run around outside. If it was something nice like clover I wouldn't care so much. I'm willing to spend some time on this because I enjoy doing stuff outside but I'm not dropping a fortune on someone else's lawn either. I'm in zone 9a and we'll probably see warm or at least not-cold temps for a while still. Is that enough time to see any benefit from a combination of weed killer, fertilization, and maybe giving everything a real short haircut to stimulate some growth? Or should I just wait until spring before bothering with it?
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Oct 12, 2022 18:09
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 07:50 |
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I'm going to guess the backyard is in the 2,000-3,000sf range based on the lot and house size plus general eyeballing. The fresh bald patch was me spending 5 minutes pulling weeds to see what it would look like if I thinned them out a bit.  If the only option at this point is to kill it and start over (which I suppose doesn't shock me)... lmao. Owners can pay for that if they want. I've got plenty of pictures so they can't pin the weeds on me when I move out 
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Oct 12, 2022 20:52
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Ah.I googled dicambra and got a bunch of stuff like Ortho Groundclear as my main results. The hope was that I could take some sort of incrementalist approach but I suppose that's like trying to move the beach one shovel at a time.
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Oct 12, 2022 21:50
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Motronic posted:You may be able to with the dicambra (or 2,4-D) by killing off areas of lespedeza and reseeding only in those areas. Maybe get started with stuff close to the house to start and do some more in the spring? That stuff spreads fast so you'll need to keep at it or its likely to take over your new grass if its left for a season or two. I think this is the approach I will take. I don't really care about the far back of the yard (which is in relatively decent shape besides being the "wrong" kind of grass) or what happens after I move out and the yard falls back into neglect. Also I don't want to accidentally kill the crepe myrtles. I weeded a few more patches of the Lespedeza and most had some degree or another of green Bermuda underneath which is already perking up a bit, although there are a few other areas that seemingly won't grow anything at all. Hopefully if I can knock the weeds back, fertilize, and aerate the dead spots some, the grass can start to fill in. Pure dicamba seems hard to find. Will the seemingly standard 2,4-D/dicamba/mecoprop-p blend work? Will an Ortho spray dial be good enough for application or should I get a tank? And lastly, should I put down some sort of pre-emergent now or wait until spring? Never seen this yard in winter so not sure what might pop up.
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Oct 13, 2022 20:35
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So an update of sorts since I hate to ask questions and then bounce. Haven't put down any herbicide yet, weather and schedule have conspired against me for weeks. I've done other poo poo, though. My neighbor - the die-hard golfer who was living here when the lawn was resodded - says the grass is zoysia and not hybrid Bermuda like I thought. Based on pictures I think it might be Zorro (which would make sense, it was developed at TAMU which is only 2 hours away). I guess I could overseed some annual rye but I'm not sure there would be any benefit other than maybe reducing erosion a bit over the winter? It's not my yard so I'm not going to make any permanent changes to it, I'm just treating this as a learning lab for when I buy in a couple years. I've been mowing it shorter and whenever I need to take a few minutes away from my computer (I work from home 3x/week) I go outside and pull lespedeza. I've probably taken out a half dozen 5-gallon bucketfuls at this point. I've transplanted sprigs of grass to the newly opened up areas and thinned out the canopy in other areas. There's usually at least a little grass under the big mats and hopefully they'll grow in a little more before the weather gets too cold. I core aerated the worst 500sqft or so of the lawn by hand. That was a pain in the rear end but my 3 year old loved helping me pick up the "poopoos" in the yard. I'll probably do it again in the spring and de-thatch as well. Around the same time, I sent off a soil sample (e: results came back right after I posted this, phosphorus is OK but potassium is very low and nitrogen... well there isn't any). Lastly, I put down a light application of Sta-Green Texas Turf. The only real goal here is to give the grass a boost so that it's in better shape in the spring. The weeds loved it too and now I'm meeting lots of new friends in the newly opened voids, like creeping cinderella weed, chamberbitter, dichondra, and nutsedge. I was hoping for a month or so of warm weather after I put it down, but the forecast literally inverted itself two days later. It's 80 today and frost on Sunday isn't out of the question if the forecast keeps trending down. Such is life. I also hosed up the sprinkler programming and overwatered the lawn for a couple weeks before I caught it. $350 water bill and dollarweed EVERYWHERE. Other than fixing the issue and letting the lawn dry out, I'm not going to worry about it now, at this point I'll probably just do a post-emergent spray on anything green over the winter. Discussion Quorum fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Nov 12, 2022 |
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Nov 11, 2022 17:23
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Got a couple spots in my backyard zoysia that are flummoxing me. Basically it's getting "leggy" -- it's growing out long stolons but not rooting. It's a very different texture than the rest of the yard. Many of the stolons look dead but a good number of them have active green growth at the far end. These pics are after I used a leaf rake to scratch up the looser dead stuff and mowed over it. There is some thatch underneath but it doesn't seem that bad. Maybe half an inch, if that. What should I be investigating here? I'm assuming compaction and/or insufficient water, so I plan to core aerate and see how much water ends up in these spots when the sprinklers run. Just wondering if there is anything else I should be looking at right off the bat. I'm willing to pick up a thatch rake too, just don't want to tear up the live stuff too badly.   I think the genesis of this is the same as all the other problems with the yard - bare minimum maintenance for many years, followed by 6 months of vacancy during which the owners did literally nothing. Not even mow. Said 6 months included a crazy hot summer with almost no rain.
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Apr 10, 2023 22:59
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Google lens is pretty good at weed ID’s or at least will usually point you in the right direction. Your state extension service also probably has a ‘common weeds of north texas’ publication. Or take pictures and send them to your county extension office. To second this general idea, I use LeafSnap and it has done a decent job of identifying the weeds I'm dealing with. I suspect the mix of weeds in North Texas is not terribly different than what we have along the coast. Atrazine will harm most southern grasses though. I think it's only labeled for St Augustine and centipede.
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Apr 14, 2023 14:58
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If I was going to top dress my lawn (Zoysia) with compost after aerating, how finely should I sift it? Is 1/4" good enough? A place near me will apparently deliver compost graded to 5/16" or less and I can't imagine the last 1/16" makes much difference.
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May 19, 2023 18:59
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devicenull posted:In my experience Zoysia does not give a gently caress, and you need to try to kill it. Ha ha ha the prior residents here accepted this challenge. I fertilized for the first time in probably years and some of the bald spots are starting to fill in at least but there are still so many weeds even after 2 applications of three-way herbicide (although in hindsight my first one was too early) Anyways it's less about that and more about not having wood chips making GBS threads up my lawn Whole thing is on hold though because I was going to aerate first and the tines of my Corona hand aerator immediately clog with clay that requires a mallet and dowel to extract. Maybe I'll rent a powered aerator or just pay someone to do it.
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May 29, 2023 13:45
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Just moved to a new house with a nice shady backyard - which means I have a whole new set of weeds to learn  This one has me stymied: https://imgur.com/a/0dq5fHu It's growing in an area that is pretty much full shade, with a little bit of morning sun over part of it. You can see there is also dichondra and straggler daisy (plus some thin St Augustine), which will help with a sense of scale. I am in USDA Zone 9a. Google Lens has suggested the following to me: Wild ginger - leaves don't seem quite right, and it appears to be spreading via stolons Dichondra - way too big, wrong color (see pics) Obscure morning glory - leaves aren't pointy Dutchman's pipe - not a climbing vine I also thought it could be wild violet, but again, leaves don't seem quite right. I plan on putting a shade garden here, so I'm trying to figure out whether this is worth saving and transplanting as free ground cover, if it's invasive, or if it's just a basic-rear end weed.
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Jul 25, 2023 01:15
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Nice wildflowers! I've got a couple scrubby/weedy areas that I'm thinking of throwing the local roadside wildflower mix or a pocket prairie mix into.stranger danger posted:It looks like dichondra is a genus and I also found this picture which has a species in the genus on the right so maybe it's another kind of dichondra? You can also try using iSeek for plant ID, a lot of people recommend it and it's worked well for me. Multiple plant-specific apps have also let me down. I've pretty much settled on some type of dichondra or, less likely, some sort of Asarum/Hexastylis (aka wild ginger). Problem is, it's not a dead ringer for any of the species I can find a clear picture of. It's definitely not Dichondra carolinensis, Dichondra repens, or Dichondra argentea, which are the three most common. Guess I'll follow the advice from the thread title and contact my extension!
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Jul 25, 2023 14:44
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Contacting the extension didn't help. The horticulture agent just said "yeah it's dichondra" and linked me to a page of common turfgrass weeds. I know, horses and zebras, but compare the mystery plant (top) to known dichondra (bottom):  Uploaded to iNaturalist to see if any of the local native plant nerds know what it might be.
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Jul 27, 2023 04:19
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Smugworth posted:Spinach One of the "AI enhanced" suggestions I got was Malabar spinach it's not that either
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Jul 28, 2023 13:15
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As someone who has lived in Flatland, USA, my entire life, my brain can not understand why your house has not simply fallen off that hill.
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Aug 20, 2023 14:50
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I would be very mad if my neighbor was burning their entire yard, both from an air quality standpoint and a what the gently caress are you doing standpoint Although if you pick the right conditions, you have the opportunity to convert the entire neighborhood to prairie grass. Rewilding!
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Aug 28, 2023 20:21
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Supposing I wanted to set up a drip irrigation system, but for reasons not worth wasting 1s and 0s on, I don't want to permanently run distribution tubing. Can I just attach the head unit to a stake near the destination and run a garden hose out to it when needed? As long as I keep the inlet capped I can't see any reason why this would be a problem.
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Aug 29, 2023 14:54
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That would actually be perfect. Do you have an example or magic keyword? Searching for anything drip irrigation with the word "stake" or "riser" gives me tons of irrelevant results.
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Aug 29, 2023 19:48
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This seems like a good place to ask for a recommendation for a 4-port hose manifold and maybe a good brand of hose-end quick-connect fitting system. There are tons of "cheap" options (which aren't necessarily that much cheaper) out there from home improvement stores or no-name companies on Amazon, but I'd like something that won't turn into a leaky piece of poo poo right away. I was looking at this Claber (which ticks both boxes) or this Melnor manifold but it's hard to find long-term reviews of this kind of thing.
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Sep 1, 2023 20:11
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So I've got this little strip between my driveway and my neighbor's fence: It's pretty dead right now because it hasn't rained since we moved in two months ago (and really hadn't rained much before that either - we are firmly in D3 drought intensity in my part of SE Texas, and D4 is creeping our way). Also I hit some of the bigger paspalums with a spot shot of glyphosate, just to see if it would actually work in this heat (it did!). But other than a lone purslane at the far end, it's just a bunch of grassy weeds. I was thinking of taking this down to dirt and seeding a native wildflower mix this fall - something like this - and seeing what grows. Thanks to the weather I have no idea how this patch is when it rains. Our soil is poorly draining clay - maybe it dries out quickly from the heat of the pavement, maybe it stays mucky, right now you could throw a coconut at the ground and the coconut would lose. Given that, I think the mix will give a better chance of finding something that likes it there. It's shaded in the morning but gets blasted by the midday sun (driveway runs N-S, this pic is facing north). I am not expecting a lush meadow in my eight-inch strip of dirt, but would like it to be nicer and maybe a little useful to the pollinators. is there anything else I should consider? It does widen out a bit as it continues outside the frame, ending up at about 3 feet near the garage where I may try to plant some native bunching grass, wild-type sunflowers, and/or milkweed.
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Sep 3, 2023 17:32
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Yeah sure I could do that, but I like native plants and am looking for excuses to cram in more Right now nobody cares about a bit of scrubbiness because there are people with a whole-rear end dead lawn, and that was before we got watering restrictions e: gently caress it, it's like $7 in seeds to cover this area, kind of silly to overthink it Discussion Quorum fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Sep 3, 2023 |
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Sep 3, 2023 17:58
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:E:looking at your pic, I would actually just fill that with landscape fabric topped with gravel or just some bricks and roundup it twice a year. That's kind of an obnoxiously tiny space. I have a similar situation that has grass on it (though its a good bit wider) and I hate it. Yeah, so about this: I took the weedeater out and scalped it. It's gravel! Not a layer of loose gravel though, It's packed/settled into the soil. It's a shame the fence is there or I would just torch it (after we get some rain). Was hoping I could plant something that could (mostly) crowd out the weeds, but you kinda confirmed my main worry. I'm renting for 2 years with a possible purchase at the end and permission to do basic landscaping - so I'm willing to do a bit more than the average renter in terms of deferred payoff, but anything that costs big money is staying in a container. Sowing $15 in seeds and waiting 3-6 months is fine. $25 of landscape fabric is acceptable. Planting 30 feet of agapanthus, based on the prices I see online, is a NOPE
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Sep 4, 2023 03:23
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If I can find a few locally, I may try them up at the head of the driveway. There's less gravel there, and they may make a nice buffer by the wider portion, where I still plan to plant something more substantial (sunflowers probably). But yeah, 3-4 years per division is a bit longer of a time horizon than I may be in this house.
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Sep 4, 2023 04:34
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This one's for the goon who wants to burn their yard. https://youtu.be/Yq7creA9GpM?si=-dozhP02aW7umAj-
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Sep 14, 2023 23:41
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Yooper posted:I worked as an underground-overhead contractor in college and saw the dumbest poo poo imaginable. But never once did a shovel go in the ground without a white flag signaling all clear or knowing where everything was. Formerly of a related industry (finance, not field). I once had some indirect involvement with a company that drilled through an underground gasoline tank. They had everything located, but the tank was not where it had been marked. Turns out the city had widened the road some years before. The gas station owner had been given funds to relocate the tank out of the right-of-way. He took the money, gave the gas station to a relative, and then left the country.
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Sep 29, 2023 20:26
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Discussion Quorum posted:Just moved to a new house with a nice shady backyard - which means I have a whole new set of weeds to learn One of these little assholes finally sent up a flower which allowed me to make a definitive ID: Lycianthes repens There seems to be very little information about it out there except that it is a toxic nightshade native to Brazil. It doesn't seem to be widely cultivated as an ornamental so what it's doing all over my yard (because once we finally got rain a few weeks ago, it started popping up everywhere) is anyone's guess.
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Oct 30, 2023 00:27
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I'm going to update them, but:Discussion Quorum posted:Contacting the extension didn't help.
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Oct 30, 2023 02:15
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FINAL UPDATE: Lycianthes asarifolia, aka gingerleaf. Found a list of local invasives published by the local parks and rec department that lead me to it. Seems like it is pretty limited to my area of the US (Houston) but it's pretty darn hardy, so I'm sure it's coming soon to a warm coastal climate near you! Bad news: resistant to herbicides Good news: edible fruits? https://archive.org/details/biostor-159037 Discussion Quorum fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 04:58
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I got a little more traction this time. They asked for pics of the flowers and confirmed my ID. All they said was that they would let other agents know to be on the lookout. Our weather is swinging between the 50s and the 80s, but I guess I have a date with Roundup and a paintbrush once we settle into the 70s for a bit.
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Nov 2, 2023 02:04
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Minor nit because I have no beef with clover and may seed some myself, but the most common clovers (i.e. white and red) are Old World plants that have become naturalized and are not US natives 
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Nov 7, 2023 23:37
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Over the winter, I started and grew out some milkweed indoors and planted them out a couple weeks ago, alongside a mature butterfly milkweed I had planted in the fall. I was rewarded with a whole crew of fat and happy monarch caterpillars. Last night the I heard the mosquito truck go by. I assume that explains the caterpillar carnage this morning. They haven't been eaten or anything, they look like they just died mid-whatever they were doing. It seems my plans for a milkweed patch have a slight flaw! e: Found 2 survivors today. Maybe it was something else? Who knows. Discussion Quorum fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 17, 2024 |
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Apr 16, 2024 15:15
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 07:50 |
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Try Google Lens or a plant ID app? If they hand-pull easily and it's just a small area, that might be your easiest option.
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Apr 21, 2024 18:41
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