In article ,
"Frank McElrath" wrote:

I have a bad clover problem here in the DC area. As much as I hate to use
chemicals, I may have to. We are planning to take a 3 week vacation
starting at the beginning of August.

Would I do damage to my grass if I sprayed a weedkiller on right before we
left, so as to minimize our exposure to it?

Our love of tidy but not very diverse yards is imprinted on us by our
culture. The immaculate lawn, under siege from ecological writers
everywhere, developed in the mild and evenly moist climate of Great
Britain. Its implications are deeply woven into our psyche. A lawn in
preindustrial times trumpeted to all that the owner possessed enough
wealth to use some land for sheer ornament, instead of planting all of
it to food crops.

And close-mowed grass proclaimed affluence, too: a herd of sheep large
enough to crop the lawn uniformly short. These indicators of status
whisper to us down the centuries. By consciously recognizing the
influence of this history, we can free ourselves of it and let go of the
reflexive impulse to roll sod over the entire landscape.


Spray and split, and leave your neighbors holding the bag. Lacks a
little something in integrity, but shows damn fine survival skills.

Now, would I prefer to have an inbred cretin with an aversion to
herbicides living next to me, or someone who is prepared to turn their
home into a Superfund site in order to get rid of clover, hmmmm. As luck
would have it, Bill who putters is already surrounded by superfund
sites, 3 or 4 in a radius of 10 miles, maybe 2 dozen within a radius of
50 miles, so you can imagine his reaction to your proposal.

Anyway, as luck would have it, the herbicide seems to be most dangerous
to broadleaf plants, and legumes, those plants so important in making
topsoil, that have been wiped out by commercial farming. But the planet
isn't your problem, is it? Now your problem is that eIther you can go
squat, and slice the offending clover off at its base with a knife, or
you can hang around after you've done your dastardly deed, and reseed
the area that was poisoned, because the lawn won't spread quickly enough
to fill in the bare spots by itself. That of course means that that you
will need to be there to water the nascent lawn patch, and thereby
putting an ugly hole in you vacation schedule.

Or, you could learn to love clover, topsoil, and your planet.

Good luck.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/HZinn_page.html