"madgardener" wrote in
:

it's crabgrass. It likes poor packed soil and if you were to topdress
your lawn and fertilize it, and not cut your good grass lower than
three inches, your good grass will choke it out. By cutting the grass
too short actually allows crabgrass to get a better hold on the soil
as it has more ground to estabilish. spot treating with herbacide
would do like RoundUp as it breaks down once applied to individual
clumps, or wetting the area down and pulling it up, then put rich
topsoil in the spots and seed with a good grass to reclaim the area.
At least you don't have the insidious Johnson's
grass...........madgardener

"John DeBoo" wrote in message
...
I've got some sort of broad leaf grass that has moved into my garden
from God only knows where. Its bad enough that I have to live with
my neighbors @#$&*&^&* Chinese Elms coming up everywhere, but now
this grass. As I said, its broadleaf, has a root system that goes
way down even for tiny growth above ground making it impossible to
puill out unless the ground is very wet. When it comes up it
typically unfurls the leafs(blades) and lays flat on the ground. It
does not send out feelers that reroot from the stems but sends
several blades out. Any idea what type it is?


I had some grass-like stuff in my yard, too. If I recall correctly, the
leaves were oval, about 2" in length, light green color. After reading
about crabgrass (I forget the other names for it), I came up with pretty
much the same things madgardener wrote. Although I think there was
something about corn gluten being a good herbicide or pre-emergent, not
sure. Anyway, was probably last month that I dealt with it, it hadn't shot
up any flowers yet. IIRC, crab grass is dormant in the fall, so maybe
it'll come back next year. This might be a stupid or 'asking for trouble'
way to deal with it, so use at your own risk, but what I did was weed whack
the crab out of all the foliage, right down to soil level. Lawn looked
like a couple of goats came through, but the next day Mother Nature dumped
half the Indian Ocean on me (sorry for the rest of you having droughts;
it's been swampy here), and now the regular grass is growing back nicely.
I did hand pick off some stragglers and the roots were not deep at all
(about the same length as the leaf), so either it hadn't established itself
or my stuff wasn't the same as yours.

For what it's worth I "aerated" the soil last fall. I put "aerated" in
quotes because it wasn't core aeration, but the other kind with rotating
blades (that some people say compact the soil rather than aerate). Anyway,
it also had the side benefit of ripping up some huge layers of thatch,
which might have been aeration enough. I only mention it because of the
comment about liking poor packed soil.

-- Salty