Gardening & Landscaping
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
lawn has patchy grass and lots of weeds!
My husband and I just bought a house, and the yard has some areas where the grass is really sparce and rough and there are weeds, mostly dandelion, throughout our 1/4 acre. This is our first house/yard. No idea what we need to do. I'd really like to not have to tear everything up in order to get a nice grassy yard. Any suggestions??
Re: lawn has patchy grass and lots of weeds!
I think a lot depends on what can be seen by passers-by, and what your intentions are for the property. A lot of people have huge back yards and only use half of it. However, I always believe it's important that what is in front of the house needs to look presentable, and dandelions are not appreciated by neighbors who have the seeds blow into THEIR property.
I was a single woman with kids and a house until I got married in August 2011. We are both older (50's) and really too busy with our lives and jobs to take care of my front and back lawns. Before I got married I found Scott's Lawn Care services and a local lawn mowing company (they do snow removal in the winter). Everyone can't afford this stuff, but to be honest, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I don't have a 1/4 acre, but I do have a sizeable back yard and the front, which is smaller, is about 40 x 60 feet, maybe more (I'm terrible at estimating, LOL). I think the Scott's service runs about $30 a month for the spring into fall, about $180 total. The lawcare comes weekly and is $16 per cut (a real discount around here). I'm a DIY sort of person, but I won't DIY anything I can't do as well as someone else. Things like sowing grass seed in sparse areas, knowing what weed killers to use, grub killers, etc, you could go crazy trying to be a pro. I'd rather turn that over to someone, and our budget allowed for it. If you've never used a lawncare service like Scott's, look them up locally and have them come out and give you an assessment. It took 2-3 years for my lawn to look good with no weeds because it required weed killer and over-seeding to get grass roots where the weeds used to be.
If you have large areas that are totally sparse, that won't support planting grass seed succesfully, you may have to pay for new sod. But unless this is in the front of the house, or observable from the street in front, I'd wait on that, get the front looking nice, then save up for the sod.
We have the same size property and are going through the same issue in our backyard right now as some animal looked like he did a UFC fight in our backyard in the fall while we were on vacation.
I would look for a local landscaping company to come and do a detaching and aeration right now. This will open your lawn up to breathe and get rid of all the dead stuff in there. If you cannot afford that.. get a garden weasel and till the area yourself and use a rake to go through the rest of the yard. Then you can throw on some grass seed (important to do this asap as you can utilize the spring rain and save on your water bill!).
If you can afford it, find a company to do a 6-7 step program where they come every few weeks. We looked into a Scotts and it was extremely expensive in our area, we found a local company that does the same thing for $39 a treatment. Our lawn has never looked better using these treatments.