Gardening/Maintenance Thread

[NTP66]

I’m curious, how much do y’all care about having weeds in your grass yards?

my brothers criticize me because I don’t really care that my lawn has dandelions and clovers in it. They see it as laziness (which isn’t entirely untrue) but I enjoy the look of the flowers, even if they are technically weeds. Pristine grass lawns aren’t as aesthetic to me

I prefer no weeds on my lawn, but have since stopped using 2,4-D to control them. I just mow over the dandelions, etc. every week. We have a nice, large flower garden for the pollinators and such.

[Sam's Drunk Dog]

Dandelions only bother me when the flowers die and they start spreading their seeds everywhere. No problem with clover.

[NTP66]

I will say that we get these really small blue and purple flowers in various parts of the lawn that we both love, and if they covered the entire lawn, I'd 100% be okay with it.

[Shyster]

As long as whatever is out there is green and covers up the dirt, I don't care what it is. I'd say at least 50% of my lawn is not grass, and I couldn't care less.

[tifosi77]

I planted 10x basil plants of different varieties in my herb garden last week, and nearly 2/3 of all the leaves have been chewed through already. That's discouraging.

[NTP66]

Not at all surprising, either.

[tifosi77]

We don't normally have active pest-type insects this early in the year, so I thought I had a week or so to get mitigation in place. Joke's on me, I guess. But I wonder if the wetter than usual winter is messing with that, as we're seeing more bugs, generally, this spring than I think I've seen in almost every spring I've lived our here before this combined.

One of the things I really dug about some of the botanic gardens we saw on our last vacation was that they had a lot of aromatic herbs (like alliums and fennel) in among flowering plants. I thought that was cool, in the abstract, but I didn't realize it was a functional anti-pest measure. Maybe I'll do that, replace some of those leafy herbs and supplement them with chives and cilantro and stuff.

[DigitalGypsy66]

Shad posted the death of the No-till planting farmer, whom I knew as a meme. But I'd just read about the no dig movement or theory, which is fascinating. Basically, your soil is its own environment with many more organisms than in outside of your soil (from worms, insects, all the way to microscopic organisms). But digging up soil - even to remove weeds - you are damaging this ecosystem.

So the no-dig movement works like this: take your garden or bed you want to plant in and cover it with non-wax cardboard. This obviously smothers the weeds and kills them, and the cardboard naturally will break down over time. Then cover the cardboard with compost or top soil and plant away. Yes, you will have to weed some, but it is drastically less than in normal tilled soil. And no chemicals involved!

[count2infinity]

I don't give two sh*ts about weeds. Whatever grows can grow. My yard is full of all sorts of stuff. As long as it isn't pokey and hurts bare feet, have at it.

[DigitalGypsy66]

As for my lawn, yeah, I don't care as long as it's cut regularly. If it's hydrated, fertilized, and healthy, the grass will smother the weeds.

[robbiestoupe]

Shad posted the death of the No-till planting farmer, whom I knew as a meme. But I'd just read about the no dig movement or theory, which is fascinating. Basically, your soil is its own environment with many more organisms than in outside of your soil (from worms, insects, all the way to microscopic organisms). But digging up soil - even to remove weeds - you are damaging this ecosystem.

So the no-dig movement works like this: take your garden or bed you want to plant in and cover it with non-wax cardboard. This obviously smothers the weeds and kills them, and the cardboard naturally will break down over time. Then cover the cardboard with compost or top soil and plant away. Yes, you will have to weed some, but it is drastically less than in normal tilled soil. And no chemicals involved!

I read up on this several years ago. I guess it could work but who is going to buy all the top soil every single year to start a new ecosystem? My garden is something like 700 square feet, I'm not doing that every year.

Weeds can live anywhere on my property except my garden. Same for chipmunks. Little pricks are already eating the small shoots coming up.

[NTP66]

Source of the post If it's hydrated, fertilized, and healthy, the grass will smother the weeds.

[mac5155]

No till on a large scale is much better for the general environment too as there is less erosion, runoff, and generally speaking less fuel used for plowing and discing. That said it usually comes with GMO/round up ready seed. Again, I don't have a problem with this personally. But I know a lot of folks do.

[CBear3]

So the no-dig movement works like this: take your garden or bed you want to plant in and cover it with non-wax cardboard. This obviously smothers the weeds and kills them, and the cardboard naturally will break down over time. Then cover the cardboard with compost or top soil and plant away. Yes, you will have to weed some, but it is drastically less than in normal tilled soil. And no chemicals involved!

I've got a fair amount of grass starting to encroach my rose bed that never had a border when we built the house. Rather than risk the roses digging it up I'm going to try something akin to this to smother it instead. I've heard newsprint is a decent way to go too.

[Shyster]

Duquesne Light is planning tree trimming in my neighborhood, and one of their reps stopped by today. The power lines run on my side of the road, and they want to entirely cut down all three of the big maple trees in my front yard. Which is exactly what I was hoping they would want to do. I'm pretty sick of the leaves and sticks, the trees are also overhanging my house and dropping sticks on my roof, the shade is why I have moss on my roof, and those trees are the ones growing into my sewer line. I don't know how many thousands of dollars that DLC is going to save me, but it's probably more than a few. Huzzah!

[dodint]

West Penn did something similar here a few weeks ago. It was all nice and good except they agreed to haul the chopped-up wood to the treeline and pitch it in the woods. Instead they left it in the remnants of a brush pile that I'm trying to reclaim as grass. Yay.

[mac5155]

Duquesne Light is planning tree trimming in my neighborhood, and one of their reps stopped by today. The power lines run on my side of the road, and they want to entirely cut down all three of the big maple trees in my front yard. Which is exactly what I was hoping they would want to do. I'm pretty sick of the leaves and sticks, the trees are also overhanging my house and dropping sticks on my roof, the shade is why I have moss on my roof, and those trees are the ones growing into my sewer line. I don't know how many thousands of dollars that DLC is going to save me, but it's probably more than a few. Huzzah!

Is it Asplundh doing the trimming?

[Shyster]

I'm not sure who is doing the trimming.

[Joegap]

They have been in my neighborhood too. They marked one of my trees for a trim. I forget the name but I know its not Asplundh

[mac5155]

My wife works for a company that does local trimming. Only reason I was asking

[Shyster]

Duquesne Light started work today. To indicate the size of my trees, they worked about 5-6 hours and none of the three trees are down, so they will be coming back. They spent most of that time on the tree closest to my house (below), which had lots of huge branches overhanging my roof. I'd say it's now 85% branchless, a second tree is about 25% branchless, and I don't think they've even touched the third tree yet. I think the project should go faster from now on because they've removed all of the stuff that was over the house.

The tree contractor is Wright. I see they're a national company that works exclusively for utility companies.

[skullman80]

I would be upset if someone butchered trees near my house like that.

I get trimming then back but they basically butchered those trees and it looks hideous IMO.

[Shyster]

Oh, no, they're cutting the trees down entirely, which is what I wanted all along. That's just how far they got. There's no direction where they could cut them down without removing all of the branches first.

As an aside, does anyone on here want some wood? Loading and hauling not included. The branches have been going into one of those huge chippers, but anything too large to be chipped will be cut into chunks and left in my yard. I don't have a fireplace, so I'm thinking a "free unsplit firewood" post on Nextdoor might be in my near future.

[Trip McNeely]

For anyone that is seeing lanternfly nymphs, insecticidal soap does the job wel. I tried neem oil but it didn’t seem to work nearly as well. Both are safe but the soap kills them almost immediately

Weirdly my younger swamp white oak is loaded with them but my red maple is not. I took down a gigantic tree of heaven last year that was loaded with them

[NTP66]

For anyone that is seeing lanternfly nymphs, insecticidal soap does the job wel. I tried neem oil but it didn’t seem to work nearly as well. Both are safe but the soap kills them almost immediately

Weirdly my younger swamp white oak is loaded with them but my red maple is not. I took down a gigantic tree of heaven last year that was loaded with them

Yeah, we’ve used that in the past on them, you just have to soak them.