Good news, bad news (but mostly good)

What the whole yard should look like.

Summer number two is behind us. I have to admit, by mid-August I was pretty ticked off about the whole thing and ready to throw in the towel. Now that cooler weather (and heads) have prevailed, I can give you a more accurate account of what's going on out there.

First the bad news. The crabgrass had its way with the lawn for most of the summer. (In spite of my corn meal gluten vigilance.) The black medick went a little nuts, too - most likely a product of my crappy builder's-grade sprinkler system. Black medick likes dry and we have plenty of that. The pinheads who installed the sprinkler system didn't give us enough heads so there are great swaths of lawn untouched by water, no matter how long I run the sprinklers. A fix for another day.

That's about it. Not too terrible.

The good news: the good grass made a strong comeback once the weather cooled and the crabgrass died off; the dandelions are much fewer in number than in previous years; and the clover patches are doing really well.

The magical fall comeback

I didn't post all summer for one reason. I was ticked off.

Spring wasn’t too bad. The dandelions were less numerous this year and the crabgrass seemed more manageable.

Then midsummer came along. Hot, dry, hotter and drier. Did I mention it was hot and dry?

Attempting to avoid a repeat of 2010, I had a mid-summer application of corn gluten meal ready to go. Before the crabgrass took over the neighbor’s lawns, I had it down. Thought I'd nipped it in the bud.

I was wrong. I might have well flushed $100 down the commode, or so I thought. The crabgrass spread like Britney Spears Twitter gossip, in spite of my corn gluten vigilance.

It was a dark moment in my organic lawn journey. After 24 months of toil, way too much money and countless weekends lost to lawn labor ... my lawn looked about the same as it did when the chemical squad was spraying and salting my yard with nasty herbicides, insecticides and other miscellaneous life-icides.

I'll be perfectly honest, I was ready to throw in the towel in this folly of an organic lawn experiment and buy some big-ass bags of cheap-ass chemical weed-&-feed for spring.

Just thinking about the lawn put me in a dark mood. I harbored fantasies of to sending Tukey email to give him a piece of my mind and calling Mike McGrath on his radio show to yell at him.

Of course, I wouldn’t do either of those things, no matter how angry I got. First, my mom didn’t raise any pinheads and second, it’s a lawn, for God’s sake. It’s not the kind of thing that warrants that kind of emotional expenditure.

So I stewed and plotted. I had a compromise planned. Come spring, I’ll go to the turf warehouse and by some straight pre-emergent, without herbicide. Maybe that way I could get a jump on the crabgrass without killing the clover I’d so carefully encouraged for the past two years. At least the crabgrass was green, albeit the wrong green.

Then something uncanny happened. By August, when the hottest part of summer was over, the lawn transformed itself. As the crabgrass died off, new growth of good grass and clover replaced it. Little by little, the days grew shorter, the nights grew cooler – and the lawn got greener.

This is what a healthy lawn is supposed to do. But here’s the news flash: it had never happened here before. Any other year, the crabgrass took over all summer. When it died, come fall, it left a brown desert in its place. When the chem-squad was showing up every other month to spread poison, they were killing the soil. Dead soil, dead lawn – every fall, like clockwork.

As I was plotting revenge fantasies against Tukey and McGrath for leading me astray, watching the crabgrass race across the lawn, the roots of the good grass were feeding and growing below. As soon as Mother Nature took the crabgrass out of the picture, the lawn bounced back – like a champ.

That’s big. And unprecedented.

Sorry, Paul. Sorry, Mike. Sorry for doubting you. Sorry for muttering unkind things about you, under my breath. You guys are OK in my book. I'm glad I hung in there.

Thank God I never sent that e-mail.

Again with the corn gluten meal

Last year we were caught with our pants down. By Independence Day the crabgrass was going completely nuts in the yard.

Mid-season around here, there's a big bloom of newly germinated crabgrass. It's obvious thanks to the bright, kelly-green color. I think it's this guy, but not entirely sure. And it's everywhere. Every lawn, empty lot and roadside. I even pulled some from a discarded flowerpot yesterday.

My lawn is pretty diverse right now - all kinds of wonderful turf crops and herbs sprawling out there. The perfect cover to hide the new blades of crabgrass. I never even saw them.

But up the street - a blue-green carpet of chemical-induced monoculture. Not so diverse. And smack in the middle, a patch of bright green crabgrass. That was my sentinel moment. It's a few weeks early - thanks to an uncharacteristic heat wave last week, I suspect.

Back to the seed store. Fortunately they still had a few bags of meal. And on to the lawn. The weather cooperated perfectly. It started drizzling as I was spreading and rained nice and steady for several hours thereafter. Mother nature watered it in for me. Today's going to be dry - the perfect cycle for corn gluten activation. It won't kill what's already sprouted but at least it will put the cabash on any new seedlings.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Year Two: Diversity

I don't know if this is wrong, right or "other." But it looks beautiful to me.

At least four species in this one small patch of lawn: the fescue I planted and three soil-improving legumes. Midway through our year-two growing season, they are pumping nitrogen into the soil, so we don't have to.

• Rabbit's Foot Clover; Trifolium arvense
• White Clover; Trifolium repens
• Black Medick; Medicago lupulina

All "weeds" according to conventional market hype (and the neighbors). Fortunately, once you join the ranks of organic turf farmers, you no longer have to swallow market hype.

The neighbors? I placate them with free homemade beer. That salves their grumbling. :-)

Hops, the sequel

Here's the 2010 harvest. Yeah, that's the whole thing, About a quarter ounce. OK, not quite enough to compete with Anheuser-Busch. But for me, a huge victory.

After trying to grow hops without success for years - I've finally hit a formula that works. And now that I'm geared up for next year's Hop Merchant invasion* ... I have no doubt the 2011 harvest will be buckets more.

I picked them maybe a week late - they were starting to get a bit brown on the edges. But the fragrance was wonderful. They're cascades if memory serves. (Hard to remember what I planted and hard to tell what survived the winter.)

A week after harvest they went into the brew kettle - helping flavor a batch of English stout we whipped up. At this quantity their presence is largely ceremonial, but it felt good to throw home-grown organic hops into the mix.

*Assuming some other creepy crawly doesn't get in under the radar.

There be hops here

I guess three's the charm.

Planted hops at the old place. Not enough sun, no hops. Planted them here, last year. No hops - the first year is all root growth. This year: hops! Yay!

Growing them organically can be a challenge, though. We had an active Japanese beetle year. I kept them at bay with garlic juice and fels-naptha soap solution. But something kept eating the hops even after the beetles split (they only last a few weeks in mid summer).

Closer examination revealed a small, fuzzy caterpillar. The aptly named Hop Merchant, also known as the Eastern Comma. Nice butterflies, but not welcome on my hop vines. So I switched the protocol to BT, the biological caterpillar killer. That did the trick, though it was late in the season when I realized my problem was bigger than garlic and soap.

Next year I'll be ready. That's what I am figuring out with this whole organic experiment. You read, you do homework and then you put your knowledge into practice. As in the rest of life on Earth, experience is the best teacher.

Why grow hops you might ask. I like 'em. They are really beautiful although not the most colorful of flowers. I brew my own beer but I won't have enough this year to actually use them in a batch. Next year, maybe. I think these are Cascades - but that's a guess. They seem to be the hardiest of the bunch. Planted three or four varieties - these survived the blizzards.

Goodbye 2,4-D. Hello, diversity

Completely amazed at how different our lawn is after only a few months without broad-spectrum herbicides like 2,4-D – what Americans spread by the thousands of ton as "Weed & Feed."

The obvious is what I expected: the clover are recovering nicely. Not only the white that I sowed in fall, but some wild red, rabbit's foot and hop clover – legumes that perform many important tasks: they are greening up areas of the lawn where grass is less successful; they mow well; and they will be pumping nitrogen into the soil all season, extracting it right from the air.

A newcomer this year: Star of Bethlehem. A type of wild hyacinth, they're not native to these parts but have established themselves as an escaped ornamental. Poisonous to livestock and no favorite of farmers, we're happy to see them since we don't have any domestic animals grazing out there.

There's a fair amount of Wood Sorrel, which accents the lawn with pretty yellow flowers.

Speaking of which, of course there's a downside to giving up 2,4-D: dandelions. But we've had precious few compared to the neighbors' chemical lawns, which were completely overrun this year. The occasional bull thistle, chickweed, creeping charlie and fleabane have to be yanked by hand. But all in all I am very optimistic – I think the sudden surge in diversity is a good sign that the health of the lawn is improving and coming off the drugs won't be nearly as traumatic as what I envisioned last fall.