December 31, 2011
My dog is almost 5 years old now. One of the things I taught her was to bark when someone had arrived at the house. This includes barking when the door bell was rung. I have noticed that recently there have been more and more commercials with doorbells ringing in them. These cause a big problem because when they ring on the commercial my dog goes crazy – I am sure she is just doing what I taught her but seriously commercial makers….can you think about these types of scenarios in the future when you are making commercials – I am sure my dog will appreciate it!.
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September 5, 2011
I am going to start out by appologizing for the length of this blog post but it was written over the course of several weeks.
Many of you know that I recently moved into a new house. When I moved in there was about 30 inches of fresh snow on the ground, so we didn’t really know what the yard look like. In the spring the grass came up and the yard looked really good….that is until July came around and my yard quickly become overgrown with a combination of crabgrass and quackgrass. Crabgrass is a pain to control but quackgrass is even harder.
For those of you who don’t know the difference between crabgrass and quackgrass, check out these 2 links for more information:
Crabgrass: http://colorlandscapes.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/preventing-crabgrass-starts-in-early-spring/
Quackgrass: http://www.ppws.vt.edu/scott/weed_id/agrre.htm
Basically crabgrass grows out on the ground instead of up and has many “arms” that come out of it looking kind of like a crab. Quackgrass is very much like regular grass but its stems are much thicker and have a lighter color than regular grass. Quackgrass also grows much quicker than regular grass so the stems are taller.
By mid July I estimate that about 65-70% of my lawn was covered by this combination of weeds. The problem is that both of these weeds attack weak and thin lawns. The previous owners apparently did not do much for taking care of the lawn. Sure they mowed the lawn, but they didn’t do much to control weeds, thus my current problem. My lawn is very thin so this stuff was thriving in my yard.
I spent MANY hours looking for information online about how to control these weeds. Most of the information I came across suggested using Round-Up to control the weeds. However the problem with Round-Up is that it will kill everything that is green that it touches. I came across a website that suggested getting a sponge wet with roundup and “painting” the taller stems of quackgrass with roundup to kill it. I thought I would give it a shot. I bought a small container of Round-Up and after about 5 minutes I had a small control area “painted” with the Round-Up. After about 3 days I started to see results! After about 5 days my results were more disheartening…It did kill the quackgrass, but I also managed to kill everything else around it. Experiment FAILED! Back to the drawing board.
Somehow I came across a link for a new product called Tenacity. This is a new herbicide that just got residential approval in April of 2011. Apparently this herbicide will kill crabgrass without affecting regular grass around it. The label does not say anything about it controlling quackgrass, and I couldn’t really find information on the websites that I visited as to if Tenacity had been tried on quackgrass and if it was successful. The best I found was someone who mentioned that some people had success controlling quackgrass with Tenacity, but there was no definitive – Yes this works – answer.
Tenacity is kind of expensive. It runs about $50 for an 8 ounce container. Before you get bent out of shape on that let me explain that this stuff must be very concentrated. The label says to mix 4-8 ounces of this stuff for every 30 gallons of water. There is a syringe that came with my order that equaled out to about a half teaspoon of Tenacity for every gallon of water. Each 8 ounce bottle says it can cover a 1 acre lawn several times. My lawn is about .7 acres and I used a little less than half of the bottle covering my entire lawn once.
Tenacity works kind of like Round-Up in that it is sprayed on the weeds/grass, the leaves absorb the chemical and send it to the roots. Unlike Round-Up there is a chemical in it that disrupts the photosynthesis of the plant effectively killing it in about 2-3 weeks. There is a note to this that when you spray it on your grass you may see some “white tips.” This is normal and does not mean that your grass is being killed – you will mow it off over the course of a couple of weeks.
I was at the point where I was either going to nuke my entire lawn and reseed or just keep playing with experiments to try to control it. Not wanting to spend my life savings on replanting my lawn I thought I would give Tenacity a try. I placed my order and about 4 days later it was at my door. I eagerly mixed up the first batch in a 1 gallon mixture in my yard sprayer and sprayed a small control area around the area that I had already nuked with Round-Up. This was in the back of my yard and was pretty non-visible from the street so if it failed on me I could just reseed it.
It took about 5 days for me to see results, but after that time I started to see some lightening of the quackgrass and the crabgrass. At first I thought it might have just been the way that the sun was shining on it, but after about 7 days I started to see the white tipping that was explained above. After about 2 weeks my control area was free of quackgrass and crabgrass (except for the dead stems) and the regular grass was still there seemingly untouched. I decided to try it again in another control area and got pretty much the same results. Now it was on to do the whole lawn.
Armed with our 2 gallon lawn sprayers, my dad and I filled up our sprayers with the mixture and started spraying. about 2 hours later we had the whole lawn sprayed. I realized when I was looking online that there was nothing really good about how it worked on quackgrass so I figured I am going to take good notes on how this works with pictures every day so others might find this useful. The following will be pictures taken everyday that I can as well as information on the weather for that day.
Day 1:
Below are the pictures that I took just after spraying the yard (about 6:45 PM)…obviously nothing yet. The weather for today was sunny and had a high of 81 and a low of 66. The dew point was about 58 degrees. There was no rain today. The previous day was very hot and humid but the grass was completely dry when we sprayed the lawn. There was normal dew that had formed later that night – about 2 hours after we had completed spraying the yard.
Day 2:
Below are pictures of the same area as above (Just a different time of day). Still no noticeable change in the grass. These pictures were taken at about 4:30 PM. The weather for today was sunny and had a high of 82 and a low of 60. The dew point was 58 degrees. There was no rain in the last 24 hours.
Day 3:
Below are pictures of the same are taken at about 4:30 PM. Not really any noticeable change in the grass yet. The weather for today started out cloudy and went to mostly sunny. No rain within the last 24 hours and the temperatures ranged from a high of 87, a low of 64 and a dew point of 62 degrees.
Day 4:
Below are pictures of the same area taken at about 4:30 PM. Although the pictures do not have any noticeable change, I think I am starting to see some lightening of the grass….It might also be lighter as it grows faster than the regular grass too….time will tell. The weather for today started out partly sunny and went to cloudy later in the day. The high for today was 79 and the low was 57. The dew point was 53 and there was no rain in the last 24 hours
Day 5:
Below are pictures of the same area taken at about 4:45 PM. Today I mowed and had a lot of time to look at the grass and weed areas to see if anything has changed….This is a good time to mention that all of the times I did my test areas I did it in the middle of a mow cycle so there were at least 3-4 days before I mowed the lawn. Although the pictures may not show it very well I definitely started to notice some lightening of the weeds. Hopefully the pictures in the next couple of days will show you more white in the weeds (a sure sign that the weeds are starting to die). Todays weather started out sunny and went to cloudy by early afternoon leading to some showers with a high of 75, a low of 57 and dew point of 56 degrees.
Day 6:
Below are pictures of the same area taken at about 4:30 PM. Noticing more lightening of the grass…Hopefully will start to see some weeds dying off soon. The weather for today was a high of 80, a low of 55 and a dew point of 56 degrees. There was no rain today.
Day 7:
Below are pictures of the same area taken at about 4:45 PM. Again noticing more lightening although I have noticed that the pictures don’t really show it so I am throwing in a bonus picture today of an area from above so you can see the lightening (ignore the area that is destroyed – that was my roundup experiment that went bad). Todays weather was a high 70 a low of 64 and a dew point of 61 degrees with a trace of precipitation.
Day 8:
I was out of town today so I did not take pictures are record the changes in the grass. Todays weather recorded was a high 84, a low of 64 and a dew point of 67. There was a trace of precipication today.
Day 9:
I was out of town today so I did not take pictures are record the changes in the grass. Todays weather recorded was a high 93, a low of 71 and a dew point of 71. There was no precipication today.
Day 10:
I was out of town today so I did not take pictures are record the changes in the grass. Todays weather recorded was a high 80, a low of 71 and a dew point of 68. There was a trace of precipication today.
Day 11:
I was out of town today so I did not take pictures are record the changes in the grass. Todays weather recorded was a high 81, a low of 62 and a dew point of 60. There was a trace of precipication today.
Day 12:
I returned home today and noticed that the grass was doing exactly as I wanted it to. There were numerous areas that are looking dead, and the weeds are on their way out. This is a perfect time for this to happen because I was able to see the areas that I missed when I sprayed. I mowed today but did not spray because it was very windy out. Todays weather was a high of 70, a low of 54 and a low of 49 degrees. There was no rain today. Pictures of the area are below.
Day 13:
Today I sprayed the areas that I missed in the first round so it will take a few weeks for that to really show progress. I am going to post the pictures of the area that I took today and post this blog post. As I see any major changes I will update this blog post to show them. Todays weather was a high of 78, a low of 48 and a dew point of 47.
Hopefully this blog post will come in handy for some people. I am very excited for the movement that I have made so far. Ultimately I won’t know the real results until next year around July when the quackgrass would normally show its ugly head. I plan to put some fertilizer down as a winterizer this year yet and again next spring so hopefully I can encourage the lawn to grow thick and healthy. If you have any questions feel free to post a comment and I will try to respond to you.
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July 8, 2011
I mentioned in my last post that I had just gotten back from the MN Spring Ride 2011. This was an event organized by Jay Folgelson. He managed to get at least 100 riders together for a weekend of fun up north. Lots of great riding, tons of spectators and an all around great time. I posted all of my pictures in my gallery at:
http://www.gahvey.com/Programs/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=8692
Here is a link to the facebook page about the Spring Ride – I also posted some pictures the I put together on there as well. Lana Merkley and Jade Whirley also put an awesome video together showcasing the event:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/MN-Spring-Ride-2011/193305297349035
Overall it was an awesome event – I cannot wait until next weekend. There were some flaws that happened, but for the first year the flaws were very minor and I couldn’t have been happier with the way it all went down.
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June 13, 2011
Wow – an entire year has gone by without a single post. In the past year there has been a ton of changes that occured in my life. I am not going to go into detail about that – those of you who know understand why though. Instead, lets look forward to the better things in life. I am not going to make any guarantees that I will be posting more frequently…That only seems to get me into trouble when I don’t post, but I will try to make the efforts on this end.
I just got back from an awesome weekend up north where the MN Spring Ride 2011 happened. I have a ton of photos and lots of video to edit, so that will take a while to accomplish, but look for a post on that soon with a link to the photos and videos.
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June 3, 2010
Wow – that race was a lot harder than I had expected. Erica and I went to Stillwater on Saturday to pick up our race packets and decided to drive the course. Unfortunately it turned out to be alot more uphill than we bargained for.
Overall I finished the race…at a better time than I had anticipated. My overall time was 1:10:18, and put me in 229th place out of 591 runners. My overall pace was about 9:35 per mile, which was about what I was running on the training runs. It would have been nice had it been a little cooler out. We did not have any breeze and it was pretty humid which made the run that much harder.
Don’t know that I will run any more races, but maybe if I do the place we do it at will have a better shuttle service after the race. Stillwater had 1 school bus running for the shuttle after the race. We waited in line for a little over an hour before we could get on the shuttle to go home. Kind of poor planning on Stillwater’s half. The only thing that was worse than that was that we had to stand in the sun the whole time. Yuck!!
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