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Posts Tagged ‘lawn’

Most home owners take lot of pride in caring for their homes both inside and out, and try to make their home the best that it can be. Nice landscaping makes a person feel welcomed to the home.

Having the correct tools and lawn care products is essential to getting your garden and lawn looking its very best. Far too many people believe that the way to achieve this is through the use of pesticides and other chemicals to eliminate weeds and keep bugs under control. People do not realize that they can have a really beautiful lawn and garden using organic gardening methods, and they won’t be harming the environment in the process.

Fertilizers used on today’s lawns are full of chemicals the worst of these being nitrates and phosphates. Since it takes several pounds of fertilizer to treat one lawn, you are exposing your family and pets to a great deal of toxic products. Fertilizers are known to trigger asthma, are a known carcinogen, and cause neurological problems in young children and pets. Worse yet these chemicals get into the soil and into our drinking water supply.

So what can you do to make the switch to organic gardening? The first change you should make is to switch to using natural compost. Despite what people think, composting is not difficult. Simply purchasing a compost container where you dispose of food scraps, pet dropping, and your lawn and leaf litter is the first step. By its very nature, the amount of composting material generated, will be a lot less that the amount of material that you start out with. You want to save your materials all year long to make enough compost to serve your garden.

Having good soil will produce a much healthier and longer root system, which will in turn produce healthier plants and grass. Long roots require less water to keep it green. This will cut back on your water bill as well.

Many communities are under water restrictions, so having good soil and a good root system will allow you to have a lovely lawn and garden despite those water restrictions.

It is also important to know that watering should be done in the early morning hours to avoid loss of water to evaporation. Watering in the heat of the day will result in most of the water being evaporated before being used by the plants. Watering during the nighttime hours exposes your lawn to fungus.

Another way to preserve the water you use is by adding a layer of mulch over the top of the soil to reduce evaporation loss.

If you are the type that enjoys spending a lot of time on your lawn, use organic gardening methods. This will keep toxic chemicals from harming your family and pets.

The use of native plants is another good organic practice. To avoid disappointment, choose the proper plants and grass that grow in your area. Not all plants grow in all area, and may need extra water and care to survive.

There is a benefit to choosing native grass and giving at a good root system. Those lawns hold up much better to foot traffic and child’s play. You certainly wouldn’t want a lawn that everyone has to stay off in order for it to look nice.

Far too many individuals immediately reach for chemicals to kill off weeds. It is important to first find out what type of weed is growing to indentify the problem you are having. Overwatering may produce weeds that thrive in a wet environment. Simply cutting down on the amount of water you are using will eliminate the problem.

Some weeds can actually be beneficial to your lawn, and you may want to leave them alone. They can serve as a natural fertilizer for your yard. The rest of the weeds should be either pulled out by hand or to use tools to remove them. Just make sure you pull them from the roots up so they can’t re-grow as easily.

Many people just run weeds over with their lawnmowers. This is not a good idea as there are seeds in the weeds. Cutting them with the lawnmower will result in the weeds spreading all over the place. This will result in your having more weeds in more areas than when you began.

One final change you need to make before you go organic is to choose the proper lawn mower. A reel type mower puts no pollutants into the air and does not produce noise pollution. You also get the benefit of exercise using a reel lawn mower.

The next best choice is an electric mower. This type mower has improved over the years. They are now battery operated and do not require a long electric cord to operate. Last is the gas powered lawn mower. These are probably the most polluting device used by homeowners. One hour of using a lawn mower is equivalent to driving 1300 miles in an automobile. To truly go organic, ditch the gas lawn mower.

With the cool weather of the fall season, most lawn and garden pests and diseases begin to dwindle away. Yet, there are a few lawn and garden pests that thrive off of the cool temperatures of the fall season.
One good point about fall lawn and garden pests is that they will not have the chance to last as long as spring and summer pests because the freezing temperatures of winter will kill them off long before they do a tremendous amount of damage.

Still, though, if these fall lawn and garden pests have been at it all summer long, they may stick around through the fall and wreak havoc on the remaining lawn and garden perennials, bulbs and trees.

Fall Armyworms

The most beautiful part about the fall season is the different colors of foliage that will begin to appear in September and October. Unfortunately, Fall Armyworms love to prey on this beautiful foliage during the fall months, as their name suggests, and can do damage very rapidly.

They usually appear in September and will stick around until the first big frost. The major problem with this fall lawn and garden pest is that they almost always feed at night, making it hard to identify the problem until you wake in the morning to leaves that have been chewed around the edges.

The upside to Fall Armyworms as a fall lawn and garden pest is that they are usually easy to spot, as they are a large tan to dark brown colored worm with a large stripe either brown or red in color on each side.
Fall Armyworms often like to make themselves present in cornfields in the early fall months and can cause major damage to the remaining corn crops. For those farmers and gardeners who are aware of Fall Armyworms, a pretreatment of pesticides will usually kill the larvae that are preparing to hatch. Unfortunately, the pretreatment needs to be established by late July or August to prevent damage in September.

Grubworms

Grubworms like the cool weather season and feed more in the spring and fall months. Fortunately as a fall lawn and garden pest they do not do as much damage as they do in the spring, but they can still be a concern for some climate zones, especially those that stay above freezing well into November.

Keep in mind that grubworms will usually survive over the winter and turn into adult beetles, repeating the entire life cycle in the spring, and this is why grubworms can be such a problem for all seasons.

Most of the time, they will hatch in the late summer and begin feeding on lawn and garden roots in the fall. This is when gardeners will notice patches of dead grass or grass that is squishy or can easily be pulled up since the roots are missing.

If at all possible, apply grubworm control in the mid to late summer, something with the active ingredient imidacloprid, which is a chloro-nicotinyl compound. This will kill the larvae before they get a chance to hatch in the late summer and will keep the life cycle from perpetuating.

Sod Webworms

Similar to the grubworms, sod webworms have a year long life cycle that means they can become fall lawn and garden pests as well as being bothersome during the spring and summer. Instead of arriving in the form of beetles, the sod webworms come from adult moths that usually begin laying eggs in the spring.

The difference is that their eggs hatch fairly quickly but the webworms are so small that their infestation may go undetected until they cocoon and reemerge as moths in the late summer to produce another generation that is more destructive. This is why you may see sod webworm problems in the fall months.

While it is helpful to use preventive sod webworm control through Microbial pesticides, the problem is that many of these pesticides will not only kill the moths of sod webworms, they may also kill butterflies and even non-pest moths.

The best method of prevention is to simply clean up leaves, grass clippings, mulch and plant debris in the fall months to keep the webworms from making webs in these places and producing more larvae.

I have a new Craftsman mower with a Briggs and Sratton engine that doesn’t start immediatly after turning it off. I’ll mow for about 15 minutes stop to move something out of my way and it takes about 15 minutes until the lawn mower starts up again. Can someone help me?

i currently work for briggs and stratton and i wanted to know if employees could by lawn mowers at a reduced price. if anyone could help it would be appreciated

When I pull the rope that turns the fly wheel, it sticks when trying to retract the rope. I have to retract and detract to get it free. Do i have to lubricate something on the fly wheel?

The engine is a 3.5hp Briggs and Stratton Classic II engine.

the NGK spark plug for the Briggs&Stratton will be similar to Rj19lm will this cause any harm?

I have this old lawn mower and I am looking to use the engine for a go kart. It is the “Snapper big six” 6HP engine for a walk-behind mower by briggs and stratton. I am looking for a site where I can go to get the basics down about this mower and hopefully read a diagram about all the parts not only of the engine but of the parts of the mower too. Can anyone find a page where I can learn this? Any other tips about making go-karts!? Thank you!

I have a briggs and stratton lawn mower. I’ve owned for about a year. It has never started easily, and now will not start at all. I am guessing that the carburetor needs to be cleaned. Can anyone provide instructions specifically for briggs and stratton lawn mowers (not sure of the model, bought it last year for about $140) regarding how to remove and clean the carburetor, and what the other causes may be?