Building a lawn from scratch

[Traum]

Originally Posted by EvoFire

I can't be bothered with my lawn right now, maybe in a few years when the kids are older.

Personally, I'm far less concerned about my lawn than I am about the trees around my house. By my own guestimate, there are at least 3 BIG trees that would destroy our house and kill us should they ever collaspe. It isn't so bad this year since we have mostly been having a pretty mild summer (on top of a very wet spring / early summer), but in the past several years, those trees have been showing obvious signs of heat & drought stress. I try to do what I can to mitigate the effects of those heat and drought stress, there is only so much I can do.

My neighbour from across the street has an even BIGGER tree, and he doesn't give a damn about its well being at all. If any of that tree's big branches snap on him, it is not gonna be pretty.

I came across this scene while I was running errands in July, and this is precisely the kind of thing that I would want to avoid:



Unfortunately, I have been seeing this sort of thing around the neighbourhood every now and then in the past couple of years.

[Eff-1]

My property is surrounded by trees and we've had a lot of conversations with the District about them. They've actually been fairly open to conversation, but they will do anything to avoid coming out and doing work at their own cost. But go figure, they agreed to give me a permit so I could trim and remove THEIR trees at my own cost (was totally worth it).

So if it's that worrisome, might be worth getting a tree company to take a look, give you an assessement and as estimate, and take to the city to convince them the trees are a risk. Best case is they take care of it. Next option is they let you do it at your own cost. Or worst case, none of the above, but you have nothing to lose. And at least then, the city is "on notice" that if something happens in the future, they'll risk being negligent.

[supafamous]

So I decided to stop watering the lawn to see what happens to it - I think we're now about 2 weeks since the last time it rained and about 2.5 weeks since I last watered it and it's still plenty green (photo is from Sunday)

I cut it half of it last night so I could put the bouncy castle out today and the clippings were wet - not soaking but what you'd expect when you cut the grass on a late October morning. My neighbours' lawns are mildly brown (watered several times a week) or completely brown (not watered at all).

I'm going to stop watering for the near future and just let the weather take care of it and see how it plays out - half the lawn is now cut down to 4" while the rest is about a foot tall. We'll see how much a big a role the clover leaves play in providing canopy to the rest of the lawn.



After a summer of having this lawn a few conclusions I can make of this seed blend:

- It's much lower maintenance than regular grass as it needs less watering and doesn't look like shit when it's long. Because it looks fine when it's tall I haven't bothered cutting it much, I only cut it when I need to put out the bouncy castle or the slip and slide and I'm otherwise fine with it being a foot tall.
- It grew much taller than I expected when I didn't cut it, maybe this is because the soil quality is really good at the moment (I gave it a lot of fertiliser at the beginning). I think its natural height is about a foot or so - I'm not gonna cut it for a few more weeks to see how tall it gets.
- It's not very traffic friendly. There was a time when a section of it went brown and kinda died off for a couple weeks b/c of kids playing on it but it's grown back fine. If you want the "perfect lawn" look this is not it - the traffic makes it look trampled on (the photo shows my daughter making a maze). To make it more traffic friendly I'm going to add a bit of ryegrass or tall fescue to it come spring.
- The name of the blend is Bee Turf and you have to be ok with having LOTS of bees and wasps etc coming by. It's not really a lawn, it's more like a flower garden.
- Fuck, it smells so good. I smile every time I'm out there when the scent comes up, it's SOOOOOOOO nice, like walking in some country meadow out in the sticks. No lawn in the city has a right to smell this nice.

Overall, 11/10 would it again. Other than the trampling with traffic it's been really great.