Hmmm

I can appreciate that everyone wants to make a buck. But I have little patience for the lawn aeration companies that go door to door pushing their service.

Lawn aeration is basically the punching of holes through the top couple of inches of your lawn/soil surface. The theory being it lets water and oxygen reach the roots...a good thing.

The machine they use to punch the holes is in many cases a gasoline powered rental with no noise or emission requirements...not a good thing. The tines on the machine are more than likely contaminated with weed seeds and various insect larvae that have been picked up along the way from every other house visited...a bad thing.

By allowing this machine to run over your lawn you could be playing host to a new generation of weeds and insect pests for years to come...a really bad thing.

Alternatively you could purchase a bucket of Red Wiggler worms and free them on your lawn. They aerate naturally and their castings condition the soil organically. It's also more efficient and cheaper.

This pic is from an ad I found. It read something along the lines of... Tree for sale...I'm selling it because I don't know much about trees. "Hmmm."

Big Weed

Today I made my first trip to the recycle center. Once I begin pruning and clearing out garden beds I'm left with a huge amount of cuttings and such. Not to mention the shrubs that didn't survive the winter. Today I had nine large bags of leaves and brush and half a truck bed of branches and cuttings.

There is a lot more to do but I try to work in sequence. I wait to pull all the new dandelions from my lawn until a few days of rain softens the ground. I also wait to cut my lawn until after the big weed pull.

Some neighbors started cutting two weeks ago which means they probably sliced and diced all those new weeds and broadcast their remnants across their lawns. If you take the time to pop out dandelions in the early days the re-occurrence rate is drastically reduced. Otherwise it's like the gift that keeps giving...all summer.

Not a good thing unless you don't mind waking every morning to hoards of people from the old country bent over your front lawn picking dandelions for tea. But then again you can always call me. I can't do much for the zillions of new dandelions but I can haul away all those people in my truck and leave them in the woods for you.

In tomorrow's post I go Neanderthal on lawn aeration companies.