Phisherman wrote:

Weed killer is harsh on grass and particularly bad for seedlings.
What you should put down is STARTER fertilizer. It won't burn young
grass like regular turf fertilizer. Another option is using organic
lawn fertilizer such as Milorganite. Leave the weeds go this year,
and treat them next spring.


A healthy lawn will choke-out most weeds. Don't water too often and too
shallow. One inch a week, in one session (assuming your drainage isn't
so bad that run-off starts before you put down an inch) is the best.
Applying less water at a time more often will encourage shallow roots
instead of a healthy lawn.

Also, too many people mow their lawn far too short. There's a reason why
golf courses only cut the grass short on the green. If they did that to
the fairway, they'd never be able to keep up with the maintenance. (And
I'm not just talking about mowing.)

Depending on the type of grass, 2-4 inches is as short as it should get.
Try to never take more than 1/3 off at a time. So if you're shooting for
4 inches, mow before it gets to 6 inches. (You're forgiven if you only
mow once a week, but the 4 inch grass has made it to 7 in just a week
occasionally. But if you waited two weeks, you shouldn't have skipped a
week.) BTW... Mulch. Don't bag. Leave that organic material there, or
you'll literally pay for it when you have to replace what you took away
by adding fertilizer. And the synthetic fertilizer is not going to be as
good as organic solution of leaving the clippings.

As for the weeds, the best way to deal with them is to dig them out. If
you have a healthy lawn, then for the most part, that's not impractical.
Until you get a healthy lawn, that may be too much work. Yet you don't
want the weeds to take over, even if you can't dig them out.

Chopping them down *before* seed heads form is the next best thing. You
may be able to get this done with your regular mowing, or you could go
out with a trimmer between mowings.

If you have a patch that's just too weedy, and digging them out is
impractical and mowing them is a loosing proposition, then you might
want to consider local application of a herbicide. Don't use herbicide
where kids or pets play, too close to vegetable gardens, before
watering, or before rain is expected. This is a last-ditch effort, not
something you should be doing on a regular basis. And watch the
overspray.

This fall, plan to aerate and (if needed) dethatch. Top dress if
necessary, and then overseed, and apply a "winterizer" fertilizer. Come
next spring, you may find you have a lawn that's so healthy it has very
few weeds. And if you have a generally healthy lawn, with only localized
patches of weeds, it doesn't make sense to apply the herbicide in the
weed and feed to the whole lawn.

So if you do it right, you don't need weed and feed. And doing it right
is probably less work than what people who do it wrong do. You've made
less work for yourself, and you don't need weed and feed, and you won't
even need the lecture about how evil spreading herbicide on your whole
lawn is, or how immoral it is to raise a chemically dependant lawn.
Those moral and ethical arguments will be moot because the best
practices are also less work, and saving work will be justification
enough to not use weed and feed as part of your routine.

--
Warren H.

==========
Disclaimer: My views reflect those of myself, and not my
employer, my friends, nor (as she often tells me) my wife.
Any resemblance to the views of anybody living or dead is
coincidental. No animals were hurt in the writing of this
response -- unless you count my dog who desperately wants
to go outside now.