Daisy seeds are germinating

The daisy seeds in my Daisy Grow Kit are germinating. That didn't take long! I actually noticed it yesterday morning, so it took roughly 6 days.

After 8 days

Cooper's Hawk

I saw a Cooper's Hawk today, at least that's what I think it was (difficult to distinguish from Sharp-shinned Hawk). I've seen them before and this winter we had one eat a dinner in our backyard leaving the feathers and beak behind - we never actually saw the bird, but the clue was that there were no footprints in the snow around it.

Cooper's Hawk.
This cropped photo is the equivalent of a 700mm lens. Unfortunately, it was
taken with a 100mm lens - I sure wish I had a telephoto for these occasions.

Today it was around plenty during the morning and appears to be building a nest in a nearby tree. I watched it as it gathered sticks off the ground and flew them up into the nest. I didn't see it much in the afternoon, but that may have been because we were outside. I was able to get some video, but it didn't turn out too great.

I'll definitely keep watching to see if it ends up nesting there.

In other news, today will be the last warm day for a few weeks. We hit a high of about 73 today and it was beautiful out for the 3rd day in a row, but it's back down into the 30s tonight.

They look like paintbrushes

Here are some macro shots that I took yesterday of some new leaves growing on some small trees in our backyard. The first three are all of the same thing. For scale, it's about the size of my index finger. I thought they looked like paintbrushes :)

Looking down at one.

It's amazing to see!

Daisy Grow Kit!

Today my wife gave me this daisy growing kit!

It is rather high maintenance!

Daisy Alaska (Chrysanthemum maximum)

I'm very excited! I have it in the window that gets the most sun - hopefully it's enough!

Thank you, My Love!

We've got weeds

As I mentioned in 2010: Part 2 - The Grass Project, we have some weeds growing in the midst of the new grass, competing for the space. I tried manually pulling some of them this weekend. Here's some photos of what we're dealing with:

I pulled all of these.

I pulled this one, but most were too difficult.

I pulled some of these. They had a strong smell.

Too difficult to pull.

Only found one of these and pulled it.

I'm quite certain this problem primarily resulted from originally seeding too thin as the grass is still thin in some areas. It needs to get growing in haste and hopefully fill in making a more difficult environment for weeds to grow.

In the mean time, I'm not sure what to do about the weeds. I'm guessing that these are all broadleaf weeds and probably could be killed with Roundup or some similar herbicide. I'm going to hold off for now and see what happens once the grass starts growing. In the meantime, I'll see if I can find any suggestions.

The Grass Project II : Backyard Edition

Last year I gave a shot at growing some grass in the front yard (full story), but I didn't have enough time to tend to the backyard even though it was arguably even worse off. I decided that I'd deal with it this spring instead, so here I am. This past weekend, I planted some seed.

Before I get too far, here is what it looked like before:

The leaves on the right side are covering a completely bare spot there.

Another bare spot in the upper right.

Generally very thin and patchy.

And the third bare spot with the brighter green color being moss, not grass.

When we moved in in 2009, the grass was actually quite lush in the back as is somewhat visible in the photos in my "Before" post. I think the sellers planted it that year as I remember noticing it when we first looked at the house earlier in the year. So what happened? I don't know, but I have some theories:

1. Over fertilization (by me). Grass in the shade needs less fertilizer than grass in full sun. When I fertilized the backyard (and I can't remember exactly when or how much, except that I did it each time I also fertilized the front yard which is full sun), I do remember that it appeared to actually make the grass worse.
2. Non-shade tolerant grass. I don't know what kind was grown, but it's possible it wasn't good in shade. It may have grown well at first before the trees had their leaves, but once the trees filled in, the grass received less sunlight leading to unhappiness.

I tend to think it is #1 since I actually noticed it getting worse after fertilizing. It is also the most thin over the most shady parts. Lesson learned. The Purdue Turfgrass Science Program suggests applying 1.0 lb of Nitrogen per 1000 sq. ft. in September and again in November and that should be sufficient for the entire year. I'll try that this year.

This weekend, I generally followed the instructions in the Seeding a Turf Area in the Spring publication using the "Dormant Seeding" approach, although, it's about as late as possible to be able to call it that. Looking at the long-term weather forecasts, it appears that winter may not yet be over, so I think the seed will likely sit dormant for at least a few more weeks (at least I hope so!).

I didn't go as crazy as I did in the front yard last year tearing up the whole yard, thank goodness. Instead, since much of the yard was already grass-free, I first thoroughly raked the whole yard to better expose the soil using a fine-tooth leaf rake. Last fall, I mulched all of the leaves that fell on the grass and left them there as a natural fertilizer. Sure enough, it was all still there this year, so I had to rake it away. Once I had raked away as much as I possibly could, I used a hard-tooth rake to loosen up the soil, particularly in the completely bare spots. In the thin spots with some grass present, this removed some of the clumps of existing grass, however, I figured this to be acceptable since new grass will soon take it's place (or so I hope!). This is what it looked like after I completed this step:

The bare spots are more clearly visible now.

Should I have just dug up the existing grass here? Hm...

I tried as best I could to rake away the moss.

Now I was ready to lay down the seed. But first let me talk about the seed that I purchased. After doing some online research, I determined that a fescue/bluegrass mix would probably be best. Surprisingly, some areas get a decent amount of sun and perhaps even full sun, while other areas probably struggle to get even an hour of direct sunlight a day. I considered trying Supina Bluegrass, but due to it's high cost, I decided against it. Most places were only selling it in a larger quantity than I needed.

Not knowing what to get, while at the store one day I decided to just purchase a bag there. So, I bought a bag of Scotts Dense Shade Mix:

Scotts Dense Shade Mix

11.75% Fenway Creeping Red Fescue
11.68% Crossbow Creeping Red Fescue
10.53% Ambrose Chewings Fescue
9.36% 04-2-LH Intermediate Ryegrass
2.53% Thermal Blue Kentucky Bluegrass
1.89% Abbey Kentucky Bluegrass

It had some Kentucky Bluegrass in it, but not much (about 8.8% - can't forget that 50% of the bag is the coating!). Maybe last year's experience with the coating throwing me off left a bad taste in my mouth, but when I bought this it was as if I was buying it as a fall back plan to save a trip to the store if I couldn't find anything better.

So I kept looking around and eventually found seedsuperstore.com. They have what appear to be all the latest and greatest varieties and are also quite informative. I used their "Seed Express" service and entered my zipcode and selected that my lawn was shady in the next step and it suggested a fescue/Kentucky bluegrass mix called SS6000, which is what I ended up ordering. They also offer Supina bluegrass which I considered, but it is expensive. I bought a 5 lb. bag of the SS6000 mix and this is what arrived a few days later:

5 lb. bag of SS6000 mix from seedsuperstore.com

19.55% Spartan II Hard Fescue
19.76% Zodiac Chewings Fescue
19.44% Garnet Creeping Red Fescue
19.77% Bewitched Kentucky Bluegrass
19.81% Intrigue Chewings Fescue

At this point, I'm a satisfied customer, assuming the grass grows, which I'm sure it will. I should note that I almost made a purchase from another online retailer called outsidepride.com, but in the nick of time I stumbled upon a review site that actually caught the owner fluffing up their rating with bogus positive reviews! I cancelled my order (actually hadn't submitted it yet) and started looking elsewhere. For the record, superseedstore.com has only one review at the same site at this time.

Anyway, on to planting. Seed Super Store suggested a seeding rate of 4 lbs. per 1000 sq. ft. I estimated (as best I could considering that the area is nowhere near rectangular) that I had roughly 1400 sq. ft. or so to cover, so 5. lbs is just about right, especially considering that I was overseeding probably 1/2 of the area.

The next day I went to the store and purchased a bale of straw to use as mulch, primarily for the bare areas to keep rain from possibly washing the seeds away. Interestingly, this wasn't in the publication mentioned above, but is in the Establishing Lawn Areas From Seed publication. I asked if the straw was weed-free, but they didn't know and said that they've been selling it for 4 years without any complaints, so I figured it would be fine. I only ended up using about 1/4 of the bale, and was careful to put it down lightly, following the suggestion to make it so that you can see approximately 50% of the soil through the mulch later - it was difficult to gauge. This is what it looked like after mulching:

I put up a little fence to keep the dog off of it.

The last thing I need to do fairly soon is fertilize. I haven't done it yet, although I have purchased some starter fertilizer that is high in Phosphorous. I figure I'll do it sometime before it starts germinating. I'm also somewhat scared to do it knowing that it may have been what caused the grass to die in the first place. Perhaps I should get a soil test done. I need to research this as I haven't found out how to do that yet, but it would certainly be nice to know. I'm going to look into this.

Once the weather warms back up and the grass in the front yard starts growing, I'll know that the soil is probably warm enough for germination (55 degrees) and will start watering. Hopefully by then our irrigation system will be back up and running (I'm so spoiled by that!), then I'll anxiously wait for the first seedlings to start growing.

I'll have more posts on the status of this project soon!

The plants are starting to come up

I took a look around the garden beds and I noticed that many other plants are starting to grow in addition to the daffodils. Here are a few photos:

Phlox

Astilbe (I think)

The 'Montgomery' Astilbe

Rose bush buds

I believe this is a Crocus (right) next to a tulip (left).

I'm excited!

2010: Part 2 - The Grass Project

Ok, so I like grass. Soft, plush, green healthy grass. We have some in our yard, actually, one spot of grass that has probably had just the right amount of sun and shade to protect it from the summer heat and keep it healthy without much maintenance over the years. I always enjoyed mowing that part of the lawn and I wished the whole lawn were like it.  A few years ago, it was probably a very nice lawn, but it wasn't any longer (at least to me). Like the rest of the gardens were when we moved in, the grass was thin in many spots and had various different types of grass present, and then crabgrass filled in the rest.

But even so, 2010 was a rough year on the lawn as it was for many lawns in the region. A lengthy drought occurred starting in late July that didn't end until November. But to make matters worse, earlier in the year I had spilled fertilizer in several places that ended up killing the grass in several spots. And, we had grubs that killed some large sections of the lawn. Here is how it looked:

Count the robins.

Note the thinned areas of dead grass, particularly the far right and the perimeter. Also, note the many robins feasting on the grubs. I count 15 in this photo. A few days later, there were over 40, but unfortunately they flew away before I could get a photo. Mmm... grubs! I'm glad they were happy, at least.

So, of course, I needed to do something, but what could I do? So, I started researching, first about grubs and then about repairing the grass. I quickly discovered the wonderfully informative Purdue Turfgrass Program site and the many great publications and subsequently started dreaming of a nice new lawn.

I found these instructions for establishing turfgrass from seed. But, there was a problem: it was already September and nearing the end of the optimum time period for planting new grass (August 15 to September 15 in Central Indiana). So, I decided to act fast and to try to squeeze it in. In hindsight, I probably should have waited or at least not gone straight to the deep-end like I ended up doing.

So much to do and so little time, I went to the hardware store and purchased a manual tiller. I took a day off of work and went to work on the dead areas to prepare the soil for replanting. But, then I got a crazy idea: why not replant some of the grass that I don't like while I'm at it? I think I was blinded by my desire for nice lush grass, because I started digging up the "old" grass and this is not how that should typically be done. You're supposed to kill it all first, then remove it, but this process can take a week or two - time I didn't have, so I decided to "improvise."

Soon, after several hours, blisters upon blisters, and with my shoulder about ready to come out of its socket, I could till no more, and I was nowhere near done. I probably should have just stopped here, but instead I decided to go to the store and rent a large power tiller. This made the job much easier and in turn allowed me to rip up even more of the lawn. Foolishly, I didn't even think about the sprinkler heads scattered throughout the lawn that were part of the (disabled) sprinkler system until I hit one of them - and then another, and another. Not to mention any buried cables, which thankfully I didn't encounter.

I'm not quite sure what I was thinking with all of this. It was turning into a nightmare and there was no turning back. What I thought would take a day of work, ended up taking over a week, working every evening, sometimes into the night. My neighbors probably thought I was nuts. I was!

Once I finished tilling the soil, I had to remove all of the old grass that I tore up. This turned out to be a very difficult task. The tiller worked the grass all over the place, sometimes 6 inches down. I basically had to sift through it and pull it out, trying to keep as much of the soil in place as possible. This step took many evenings to complete.

At this point, I was getting closer. The next step according to the instructions I was trying to follow was:

The soil should be allowed to settle after tilling or compacted slightly with the tires of a tractor or other suitable implement. Heavy rains and/or irrigation will hasten settling. Allowing the soil to settle with prevent undulations and difficult mowing in the future.

Um, let's see, I had no tractor, no time to wait for rain (guess I probably could have irrigated, but I wanted to plant that day). In the end, I used a piece of peg board and stomped on it over all of the soil. Surprisingly, it looked pretty good, but will it end up even? I guess we'll see. And now, my neighbors officially knew I was nuts - really, who jumps on their lawn?

Next I raked it over and made it look even nicer. At this point, I was pretty happy with how it all had turned out. Now it was time to seed it. But uh oh, what seed should I use? I was no expert, but had researched a little and knew that Bluegrass is the type of grass that I like, so I went to the store and bought a bag of Scotts Bluegrass mix:

Scotts Kentucky Bluegrass Mix

29.43% Abbey Kentucky Bluegrass
13.26% Courtyard Kentucky Bluegrass
5.05% Thermal Blue Kentucky Bluegrass
50% Water Smart Coating

In hindsight, doing more grass seed research would have been beneficial. There are many varieties of bluegrass grass, some better and more advanced than others. While the kind I used will probably be just fine, I also probably could have done better. The National Turfgrass Evaluation Program is a great resource for researching different varieties for various locations. I'm still baffled by all of the different types.

For mulch, I also purchased a bag of GreenView Grass Seed Accelerator:

GreenView Grass Seed Accelerator

0.7 - 1.1 - 0.4

With these two products, I made two mistakes:

1. I didn't plant enough seed
2. Since the mulch had fertilizer in it, I didn't fertilize

The seeding rate was probably the biggest mistake because I only put down about half of the bag of seed (approximately 1.5 lbs). What threw me off is the 50% coating. The experts said to put down 1.5-2 lbs of seed per 1000 sq. ft. Since I was working with roughly 1000 sq. ft., I figured half the bag would be about right. Well, I forgot that half of the bag was actually the coating on the seeds! So, instead of putting about 1.5 lbs. or so down, I only put roughly half that. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until several weeks later when the grass started to germinate and I noticed that it looked rather thin. As soon as I could, I planted the rest of the bag hoping it would have enough time to become established before winter.

The second mistake I made was to use the mulch as the fertilizer. I failed to actually look at the bag and see how much fertilizer it had in it: 0.7-1.1-0.4 - not much at all; certainly nowhere close to the recommended 1.5 lb of Phosphorus per 1000 sq. ft. So, essentially, I didn't fertilize. This may or may not have been a big issue because I didn't do a soil test.

This is what it looked like after it was all said and "done" (with half the seed on at the time of this photo):

September 11, 2010 : After the seed was planted and the first watering.

I watered as frequently as I could, which ended up being two times a day: once in the morning and once in the evening. Eventually, after about 2 weeks, the grass started to grow. It grew very slowly and never very tall. I know that bluegrass is not very quick to establish, but I wonder if it could also have been impacted by not having much Phosphorus, or some other factor.

As soon as the first blades were roughly 2" tall, I followed the instructions to mow at 1.5" for the first few times. It was strange to be stepping on the grass when it was so new, but it seemed to be ok. It never grew much taller than that, though. After about 4 weeks, I applied about 0.75 Nitrogen and then again 8 weeks after germination. Thankfully, temperatures stayed fairly warm late into the fall giving more time for the grass to grow. Also, after about three weeks of twice daily waterings, I caved in and called someone out to take a look at the irrigation system to see how much it would take to get it working. Several hundred dollars later, I was a very happy man.

After a much needed winter's rest (for me!), here is how it looks now:

March 2010

This is only showing the top left side of the before photo and from a different angle - not the greatest before/after sequence, but it shows that something grew there - it wasn't a complete flop!

However, there are still several potential issues to contend with:

1. It still isn't very thick and in some places, particularly near the edges of the existing grass, there are even bare spots.
2. It is still pretty short, and the edge of the existing grass is very evident since it's much taller.
3. There are quite a number of weeds.

It'll be interesting to see what happens once it starts growing again this spring when temperatures get warmer. Will it fill in and thicken up? Will it grow taller? Will it grow at a comparable speed to the existing grass? Will the weeds be overcome? We'll see.

I'll have another post on the weed problem soon.

2010: Part 1

In 2010, I was a bit more busy. I did some planting in July and major work on the lawn in the fall.

For this post, I'm just going to cover the July plantings. These are the perennials that I planted in the front yard:

'Kobold' Spike Gayfeather, 'Montgomery' Astilbe, Perennial Gaillardia

And here are the perennials that I planted in the back yard:

'Nora Leigh' Garden Plox, Coral Bells, 'Midnight Rose' Coral Bells

I also planted some Impatiens. Here are some photos of what it looked like once planted:

Phlox, surrounded by three Impatiens. Also visible are some Hostas and the
Japanese Maple.

This is just to the right of the above photo. Both Coral Bells. Also
visible is a large Hosta.

And finally, I bought some potted plants (one was a Geranium) and a hanging plant of some sort.

Geranium

Hanging plant. I can't remember what this was, but the pink/orange
 flowers opened when it was sunny. Very beautiful.

An awesome colorful leafy plant that I will definitely be getting again.
These leafs were in excess of 8" in length. Unfortunately,
I don't remember the name. 

This is a close-up of the Phlox. Very beautiful.
Unfortunately, it lost its flowers as time went on.

Everything did fairly well except for the Phlox and Geranium. The Phlox didn't get enough light and quickly lost all of its blossoms and struggled to grow more (but stayed alive), and the Geranium I over-watered. Lessons learned: Geraniums like it dry; Phlox need more light - being in the backyard, I'm not surprised and knew when I bought it that it probably wasn't going to have enough light. I'm going to try to transplant it this spring to the front yard in a hopefully sunnier spot. We'll see how that goes...

In the next post, I'll cover the lawn project that I did in the fall.

2009

I haven't done much since we moved in. I really only trimmed the bushes up as best I could until the fall of 2009 when I won a silent auction for about $200 worth of plants and some manual labor. This was the first semi-major work done, granted I didn't do any of it. First of all, we had the extremely large and overgrown burning bush removed and replaced with a much smaller Kyushu Hydrangea Tree. In addition, we had the two "prickly bushes" (maybe Barberry?) on both sides of the garage replaced with two rose bushes (forget what type). Other than that, we had some other flowering plants planted in other parts of the yard. In the backyard along the deck, we had some Lily Turf (I think) planted. In the front yard, we had a handful of different varieties - all perennials, but I didn't pay close enough attention at the time to remember what they were. I'll have to figure them out some day. However, some of them didn't make it the next year, probably due to my lack of properly caring for them. It also could have been the soil they were planted in as I noticed when later replanting in 2010 that roughly 4-6 inches below the soil is clay.

The Before

In this post, I'll try to document the house as it was in 2009 when we moved in. The pictures are from May. The photos don't show the gardens very well, but it's all I have of the "before".

The Front Yard

The front yard only has a few trees.  There is a oak tree in the middle of the yard and a few others on the sides (not sure what kind).

Facing West

Facing NW

Note the many overgrown bushes, such as the huge burning the the left of the garage. Also the grass is not very uniform. There seem to be many different types present, some of it crabgrass. There aren't very many plants in the garden beds. There are some daffodils and a few tulips that grow under the oak tree and the other small tree visible toward the left center of the second photo. On the North side of the house (right side of the photos), there are a few hostas of various varieties. On the left of the garage in the corner of the grass, there is a large decorative grass (dwarf fountain grass, I think), and in the bed on the right of the garage, there is another type of decorative grass (not sure what kind). Overall, it's not bad. I bet in the past when it was cared for it was very nice.

The Back Yard

In the backyard there is a small forest of fairly large trees. Many trees are on the lot as well.

Back yard facing SW

On the south side, there is a fairly large garden bed, currently hosting some hostas, ferns, pachysandra, and ivy. In the spring, there are daffodils. Not pictured, but somewhat visible in the lower right on the above photo is another small garden bed that goes around the perimeter of the deck. It hosts what I believe may be a miniature Japanese maple of some sort, another large hosta, daffodils, and some other flowers that I can't remember what they are. I hope to do some work on this garden this year.

Back yard facing N

There is not much on the north side. Along the house there is a garden bed with more pachysandra. Thankfully, many of the trees on the lot have had the branches trimmed up to about 10-15 feet. This allows enough light for a small grassy area, and hopefully some more plants in the future. The rest of the backyard was mulched. There are bricks separating the grass from the garden beds around the whole house. I think the shade will be the biggest challenge that I'll face in the backyard.