I dropped the ball on my lawn. I refused to put chemicals and after 5 years, this happened. What can I do? Where do I even start? Do I use some chemicals, kill the weeds, let some time pass, then plant grass? Whats weed kills exactly should i use? Am I too late in the year for this?
by _-zalmoxis-_
11 Comments
It looks great. I would just water it.
Doesn’t appear you have enough sunlight hours for the typical lawn grass here. Can you get some pics of the canopy/trees?
It’s green and it’s keeping the sun from burning up the soil biome for the moment. What’s your actual goal?
If it’s functioning, why kill it? It looks like grass from a distance.
Watcha need a bunch of grass for? Looks like you got some soft stuff you can walk on that doesnt require tons of water, stays green, and has some bugs and birds. Yeah oxallis seeds are going to be everywhere and will keep popping up. Lawns take up a ton of water which we usually don’t have enough of.
I think it looks fine, maybe throw down some wildflower seeds for next year?
You’ve got a lot of really nice native & well adapted groundcover plants there. I see horseherb, wood sorrel, and ponyfoot. Maybe even some random mint?? If you want a turfgrass look, there’s a subreddit for that where you’ll probably find better advice. If you’re wanting to keep maintenance costs down & be conscientious about conserving water, check out native & adapted grasses, such as buffalograss or Thunderturf, & more groundcovers, like frogfruit which does better in full sun than what you’ve got.
It looks great. I agree with adding frog fruit for sunny areas.
I thought this was rage bait because you have such beautiful, full coverage, native ground cover. I’ve been trying to slowly replace areas of my yard with this because the St. Augustine is so thirsty and scratchy. Bravo! Keep it!
Come end of July, be prepared for this to fry, literally turn into ash and die – you’ll be left with a potential dust bowl. The options are: till all this up, put down some dirt and compost and sod or seed. Then plan to spend probably $500 on water for it to grow plus whatever to maintain. Or xeriscape and plant plenty of pollinator and drought friendly plants, place a bunch of bird baths or a good fountain, and set/forget. Either way, it’s going to cost a pretty penny – one stands out to me as a better long term solution though.
The real question is how much time and money you want to dedicate to trying to make it look like pristine mowed grass. Or do you want to barely have to mow and the plants stay greener than grass during the summer without having to do any extra watering. You probably also have a number of invasive plants that should be targeted individually.
As you likely noticed, no one is going to actually help you because everyone is obsessed with re-wilding the small scrap of green in their front yard.
They might even know how to help! But they won’t.