 Maintaining a so-called perfect weed-free and manicured lawn that takes a lot of time and money. So tonight let's talk about some alternative approaches and that we have Dr. Greta Gramick. Greta is an associate professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at NDSU and Greta, your life is so surrounded by weeds. It's just unbelievable. You teach courses on weed identification, weed biology, and weed ecology. Greta also conducts research on non-chemical weed management, integrated weed management, weed ecology, and also weed management in organic production systems. That's a lot of weeds, so you are the right person to talk about that. Greta, thank you and welcome to the forums. Okay thanks Tom for the introduction. I'd like to offer one caveat, which is that I am a weed scientist and not a turfgrass expert, but I got interested in this topic because I am an owner of a lawn. And so first though I'm going to be a little academic and take you through maybe a five minute version of my weed ecology class. We're going to start off by defining what ecology is. So ecology is a scientific discipline and as such ecologists are trying to understand the natural world by collecting data and testing hypotheses. Sometimes people get confused and they think that ecology is equivalent to environmentalism, but it's a formal scientific discipline. And to understand it a little bit we can break down the word ecology. It comes from two Greek words, oikos, meaning household, and logos, meaning study. And so our house is the planet earth, so we're studying everything and that's why ecology is a very difficult scientific discipline because everything is very complicated and there's lots of interconnections. Alright so that's the ecology part. What about a weed? If you ask people what's a weed, most people will tell you well it's a plant out of place. And that's a pretty good definition from some viewpoints. But there's lots of other ways of looking at weeds and so I want to go through these. The first is an anthropogenic viewpoint and that means from the humans viewpoint. And a plant out of place would be a definition of a weed that is based on this viewpoint and it has to do with our values and it says that weeds interfere with our objectives or our requirements, but that's not the only way of looking at a weed. There's also a biogeographical viewpoint that views a weed as an invader from a non-native introduced place. It's an alien and so a lot of our noxious weeds for instance are introduced from other places and that's one of the things that causes them to be invasive. And then finally there's an ecological viewpoint and this says that weeds are pioneers in succession or they're colonizers so the ecological viewpoint is defining weeds in terms of their function in ecosystems. They're just plants and they happen to evolve to fulfill certain roles and a lot of them are really good at colonizing disturbances and humans are good at disturbing things and so hence we have lots of weeds. So when we study weed ecology we're studying interactions. We're in the case of a crop land system we might be studying the interactions between crops and weeds, the animals in the system, the microorganisms in the system and also how all those things interact with the abiotic environment. So we use that understanding to create weed management approaches. So I thought I'd give you just a brief history of weed management before we talk about weed management approaches. Prior to 1946 weeds were mostly controlled mechanically and there were some inorganic herbicides like sodium arsenide, salts, acids but these were non-selective meaning they would damage all the plants. In 1946 with the introduction of 2-4-D we then had a synthetic herbicide that was selective. It would kill broadleaf plants but not grasses and that's extraordinarily useful for lawns and in crop land. So when we're spraying herbicides on our lawn we're spraying chemicals generally that will kill the weeds but not the grass. And then of course we had the GMO era and there are some turf grass plants, some turf grass grasses that are resistant to glyphosate but I won't talk about that very much. So herbicides work very well in crop lands and also in lawns but there are a lot of challenges to herbicide intensive approaches and especially with regard to lawns we have some environmental concerns, social and health concerns, and also maybe some economic concerns because it's expensive to spray all those chemicals. And so maybe we would be interested in formulating some alternative approaches and the concept of integrated weed management gives us a framework in which we can envision a more multi-tactic approach to managing weeds in lots of different types of systems but it would be applicable to lawns and integrated weed management tries to pull together a bunch of different tactics from four different categories physical, cultural, biological, and chemical. And the main philosophy is we want to use a variety of tactics because no one strategy is a silver bullet but we can do a lot of things together to achieve our management goals. So now I'm going to get into the part about lawns and I'm going to try to connect the ideas about weed ecology studying all these interactions, integrated weed management, lots of different things, and what we're doing with our lawns. But first a little bit of lawn history. So the earliest lawns were areas of low vegetation they usually weren't grass they might be things like creeping time or chamomile and these surrounded medieval castles in France and the UK and the function was to have some low vegetation so you could see the enemy coming to your castle. It wasn't until about the 17th century that wealthy brits adopted grass lawns that were closely shorn and because this was prior to the invention of the lawnmower they were often shorn by sheep and lawns eventually came to the United States but they were still really only for wealthy people. But there were a few things that happened that changed that one was urbanization leading to an interest in green spaces and parks and this included lawns and then the invention of the lawnmower facilitated mechanical management of these lawns and you didn't need to have sheep grazing them anymore and then finally and most importantly probably the development of suburbs in the 1940s and 50s led to widespread adoption of grass lawns by middle-class people and it was during this time that the idea of a perfect weed-free neatly manicured lawn became kind of a symbol of upward mobility because remember these lawns were once only something that the wealthy could have and furthermore these lawns would signify an admirable, upstanding moral character and anyone who has a neighbor has probably felt their neighbor's eyes on their yard and that you feel obligated to keep your yard a certain way so that your neighbors will be happy and that's kind of what I'm talking about. So that's what we're seeing here in the picture on the left. You've got this beautiful pure grass, it's shorn very closely and it's neatly edged, there's no weeds or any other plants to be seen and that's what people have come to view as beautiful and desirable. However, there are a lot of drawbacks to maintaining lawns like this. Lawns cover 40 million acres so what we're doing with our yards has a huge impact on the ecosystems, that's just in the United States and these yards are using 30 to 60 percent of our fresh water. We use 90 million pounds of fertilizer a year in the US, 78 million pounds of pesticides per year on our lawns and all of this costs 40 billion dollars per year. Furthermore our mowers emit tons of pollution as much as 34 cars because mowers don't have the same standards for emissions controls that automobiles have and also all that fertilizer use tends to result in runoff of nitrogen and about 40 to 60 percent of the nitrogen applied to lawns runs off into our surface waters and acts as a pollutant and so for all of these reasons people are trying to re-imagine what they could do with this space around their house called a lawn and I'm going to talk about a number of different ideas that people have about this re-imagination and one thing is that people are interested in growing food in their yards and there's a lot of advantages to this. Why grow food in a city lawn? It is a part of positive community development, it can contribute to education especially of disadvantaged people and children, you're reducing food miles, increasing access to fresh produce and the produce promotes human health. These gardens also provide ecosystem services like food for pollinators and they can also help regenerate wasted areas in cities like empty lots leading to improvements so there's a lot of reasons to re-imagine places that could be lawns as gardens instead but we also have all these lawns in the city and sometimes lawns and gardens don't mix very well. Last year in my garden I had a big beautiful strawberry patch and then in mid-June I came out one day and noticed that in the middle of my patch it was just brown and dead and it was caused by herbicide drips. Someone had sprayed their yard and then that herbicide had volatilized and drifted and hurt my strawberries and so maybe people don't realize this but herbicides that are used on lawns can move around and they move around via drift in the wind and also volatilization that occurs with heat and although some formulations are safer and less prone to volatilization, a lot of the forms that are used by lawn care services have this problem and it is very risky for a lot of ornamental and edible things that you might be growing around your lawn like grapes, tomatoes, beans, melons, and a whole host of horticultural plants like elders, maples, and roses. So in order to solve this problem we still want to control our weeds but maybe we'd like to cut down on some of this mowing and fuel use and nitrogen fertilizer use and pesticide use and so we can go back to what we know from ecology to find some answers and one thing that is a fundamental tenant in ecology is that nature abhors a vacuum. If there is an open niche then something is going to come in and in a lawn that is going to be generally speaking a weed so if you mow your grass way too short you are going to create spaces where weeds can come in. Another theory in ecology is that greater species diversity leads to more stability and greater stability leads to a resistance to being invaded by weeds so we can take these two principles and put them together with ideas from integrated weed management and come up with some new solutions for beautiful lawns. So on the left this is a picture of a lawn that was created using no-mow fescue species and these just grow to that height and you don't mow them at all and how it works is it's just a thick mat of turf and there's no vacuum a weed can't get in there and so you don't have to mow you don't have to put on herbicide easy peasy. Sure you have to get used to the fact that it looks a little different but it's still beautiful and green and you don't see any weeds in there. Another idea is to increase the diversity and one way you could do that is by adding white clover and so this is something that's gaining a lot of popularity. Clover used to be common in yards. When I was a child Dutch white clover was in every yard but then with the advent of using all these broadleaf herbicides in our yards to kill dandelions the clover went away. But now people are getting interested in bringing it back in and there are interesting new varieties of white clover. One is a micro clover that's a lot smaller than the typical Dutch white clover and all the clovers have advantages in that they reduce nitrogen use by one to two pounds per thousand square feet because these plants are legumes and they naturally fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. They create a lush dark green lawn. You can see in the picture how lush and green that clover area is. They do mix well most of the time with cool season turf grasses. Sometimes you might get a little bit of a dominance of the clover especially in lower nitrogen areas and to achieve this there's two different approaches. One you could start from scratch and plant grass seed that contains about five to ten percent clover seed by weight. Or you could seed into existing turf by mowing very closely then aggressively dethatching to open up some niches and then you would seed your clover in and water it well to get it established. So that's how you create this. There are a few drawbacks. Two-fourty will damage clover. MCPA is generally okay but the idea is really that you would want to get away from using herbicides in your yard. I have clover in my yard and I haven't used any herbicides in many years. Another possible detractant is that clover attracts bees which some people really appreciate because they want to help the pollinators but this could be an issue for people with bee sting allergies or perhaps people with children. Another advantage that I might mention is that clover is naturally resistant to pet urine. So if you have a dog and you're tired of all those yellow patches maybe a clover yard would be something that you could try. So some more ideas to cut down on the weeds and the mowing and the herbicide would be to mow a little less. In my yard I only mow once every two weeks. I let the grass just get a little bit longer. I aim for about four inches instead of one to two like most people aim for and that really helps out compete all those weeds. Another thing that you can do is early in the summer or late spring just go out and pull a few dandelions. I spent maybe two hours pulling dandelions in my yard last year and I never had to worry about dandelions again. My yard looked great and I didn't use any chemicals. Another thing that you can do to cut down on the fertilizer in addition to planting legumes like clover is don't remove the organic matter from your yard. It's valuable. It feeds your yard so instead of bagging your clippings use a mulching mower and let those clippings decompose back into the soil. Then in the fall and I tried this last year for the first time and it was really a lot of fun and so much less work than raking and bagging all those leaves. I just ran my mower over the leaves a couple of times and I found some research from the Michigan State University and they did this for two years and showed that after two years of mulch mowing leaves dandelions and large crabgrass were reduced by 100%. Not only are you saving labor and you're adding organic matter to your yard but you're also suppressing weeds so it's just a win-win-win to do this. To make it even better get an electric mower and then you're not polluting. So there's again lots of benefits of trying to have a more natural and ecologically balanced approach to lawn care. It's less costly, less laborious, it's safer for pets and children, you can reduce your fuel consumption and noise pollution, you won't harm your edible and ornamental plantings and it can be very beautiful if you can just shift your mindset away from the idea that a lawn has to be a perfect weed-free, closely mowed, grass-only situation. So those are the benefits but there are some barriers to adopting this kind of lawn care. Your nata-bers may not understand and they may be upset with you. If you're growing your vegetation taller than 8 inches high, many city ordinances including Fargo I know does prohibit that kind of vegetation. Moorhead, Minnesota on the other hand has a natural lawn care program and you can apply to the city to do almost anything that you want, you just have to present them with a plan that they then approve. But if your city doesn't have that option, what can you do? You can talk to your friends and neighbors and tell them what's great about what you want to do with your yard and then you can also, in the process of changing attitudes, maybe work to change your city ordinances so that you can have a program like Moorhead, Minnesota does. And I think that's all I have for you. I hope that you guys will enjoy trying to take a more natural approach to lawn care and if you have any thoughts or questions I would be happy to address them. Okay Greta, we've got some questions already for you. The first question has to do with that fast duty you mentioned. And is it hardy in this climate and how tall does it get to grow? How tall does it reach? Well I don't know. I don't know if it's hardy in this region. And as far as how tall it gets, I think it's meant to only get about 6-8 inches tall and in the picture you could see that it wasn't especially tall. It tends to sort of fall over and mat down. There are some, fescus can be more warm season and so you might look into it but there may be different varieties that would be suitable to cooler climates. Yeah, you mentioned Nomo Fescu. That's kind of a trade name and I know a prairie nursery used to offer Nomo Fescu. You just showed a beautiful picture of it and I think it's hardy in zone 4 at least. So that's something to investigate. That's good to know. There are a lot of interesting clover that you stimulated. Does clover do well in part shade? I think that it would do okay about as well as turf grass. In super shady areas it's probably not going to be that happy. You know you talk about how plants compete with one another. How do dandelions compete with clover? You know what I've noticed in my yard is that the dandelion, there's some areas where the clover patches are really thick and there seem to be fewer dandelions in those areas than in the areas that are more pure grass. So I think that the clover is a pretty good competitor against the dandelions but if you stop using the chemicals altogether you're probably always going to have a few dandelions and that's why I usually just go out and pull a few of them out and keep on top of it that way. The real key is to mow at a higher height. That's what really helps keep those dandelions down but if you already have a lot of dandelions you might benefit from pulling a few of them out in the spring. Okay how about you know another problem with clover they say is that stains the kids clothes more when they roll the bread. Does it stain the grass? I don't have kids so I don't have kids with that. I love it when my kids come home with stains in the yard. That means they're active and having a great time outside. I think tight and most other normal stain or detergents will get out clover stains. It's not going to ruin your clothes. Why do those weeds grow so much faster than the plants that you want? You're trying to grow. That's a question. If you go back to my definition of a weed as being an ecological definition that's based on the function of a plant and that a lot of weeds are colonizers and the reason that they are good colonizers is that they grow very quickly and they make up nitrogen very fast. That's their function to grow fast to cover an area that's disturbed to hold it in place until the slower growing more slowly establishing plants have time to come in. That's what it means to be a pioneer of succession and so a lot of weeds grow very well to nitrogen. A lot of studies have been done about this in crop land. They've showed that weeds like pigweed and lamb's quarters benefit from extra nitrogen much more than crop of wheat would. That's one reason why people got interested in using banded applications. That doesn't have anything to do with the yard applying a lot of nitrogen fertilizer to your yard. You're just encouraging the weeds almost more than the grasses depending on what the weed species is. Let's keep moving through these questions. There's someone who lives in western North Dakota and they're looking for a recommended grass seed that can especially be useful in lowering their water usage. I wouldn't be able to answer that question like I said. I'm not really a turf grass expert and so I don't know that much about specific varieties. I think that most grasses need some water and that's why in areas that don't have a lot of water like in California or New Mexico you're generally recommended to do something else like it's called xeriscaping where you would grow plants that are really suited to drier conditions. If I lived out in western North Dakota where they get 10 inches of rain a year I might try doing something like that if I was tired of watering constantly. I think that would be a lot more ecologically sound. I think most grasses are going to need some water. I think you had some good points also about management like if you mow tall the tall turf will naturally shade the soil and keep it moist and also when you let the clippings fall that will be a natural mulch that can reduce water use. I would have this gardener consider incorporating some crested wheat grass which is a xeriscape drought tolerant grass and that's pretty common out here in the west to add that to your bluegrass mix. Do you want to talk about how we control creeping Charlie Greta? Yeah, the one thing that I've heard that works for that is using a borax solution. Have you ever heard that Tom? Yes, borax is actually creeping Charlie is especially sensitive to borax and although borax it's not labeled for use as a herbicide so we can't officially recommend it you can find information this started from Iowa State over 20 years ago how they discovered this and there's recipes that can help this to suppress creeping Charlie but I also like your idea Greta as far as I think creeping Charlie is not the ugliest weed out there. The British grow it the rich grits or on their castles they like creeping Charlie and cut your lawn tall It's an interesting smell to it when you cut it. Yeah, it's in the mint family. People use it for tea. How about that? Greta the problem with your natural lawn you're going to attract too many bunnies Oh yeah, well I actually I like it because the bunnies stay out of my garden eating the clover in the yard so if you're trying to grow vegetables in your garden it might actually be helpful to keep the bunnies out of your lettuce but yeah it's true that the rabbits like the clover quite a bit but we can deter that by putting a fence around the garden then we get the best of both worlds. We can have lettuce and clover How about the question here I'm going to kind of maybe focus on questions the question about lawn grass and mosquitoes have you had any experience with that Greta you have more of a mosquito issue in the tall turf I don't think that would really be an issue I mean we don't agree in standing water so unless whatever you're doing is generating standing water I don't think that it's going to affect the mosquitoes very much Have you had any experience with use of fine fescue as a low input lawn product I haven't that's less that requires less input and it's more suited for shaded areas so if you've got a shaded area a fine fescue can work there Another zero escape grasses include blue grama grass or buffalo grass Have you had any experiences with that Greta I've seen a lot of prairie grasses and I would think that they wouldn't look quite like a typical yard and they might be more difficult to establish but it's possible I think that the crusted wheat grass is really a better idea for the Dickinson Research Extension Center for example a lot of their grassy borders have a lot of crusted wheat grass and it seems to do really well but I don't see those other types of grasses Those native grasses they tolerate warm weather better so what happens is my neighbor has buffalo grass growing up in spring and it looks good for a couple months of summer but then it gets turns yellow quickly again so be aware of that those are warm season grasses We don't have any recommendations about the best clover varieties How would you go about handling that Are there lawn varieties of clover Well there's the regular Dutch white clover and then there's this micro clover that I'm talking about and I don't know if they're different species there's certainly different varieties and I think people are interested in the micro clover because it's shorter and you might be able to have created 100% clover yards that you don't have to mow Ok so I think that's a new term I learned tonight micro clover so I think that's something to think about and to focus on and you wanted to keep your vegetation below that 8 inch limit that most municipalities require then if you grew the micro clover it would just naturally be short and you wouldn't have to mow so much at all How about I know you're a Canadian thistle expert this person keeps dropping Canadian thistle they keep cutting at ground level and it just keeps coming back up but it still comes back Maybe they should watch the presentation 2 years ago about how to control I wonder how big of a patch it is I don't know Well I guess in terms of things that are legal there's probably not a lot that you can do as far as herbicides go If it's not that big of a patch and you're really determined to get rid of it you could spray it with Roundup Spray it One thing about treating Canada thistle is it really matters when you treat it and so if you spray it in the fall that's when the plant is translocating sugars down into the roots for fall storage and so it will suck that herbicide down into the roots and kill the roots more So you might try altering when you're spraying it and then if that doesn't work and it's not that big of a patch I've had some luck with getting rid of Canada thistle using putting down some heavy landscaping fabric and then a bunch of organic mulch on top of that and just smothering it for a couple of years and that might get rid of it if you're willing to put up with that unsightly mulch in your yard if it's not that big of a patch but Canada thistle is a tough one It's almost a signal to me that generally speaking Canada thistle shouldn't be in turf grass healthy turf grass I don't think of as being invaded by Canada thistle all that readily and to me that's kind of a sign that maybe there's some underlying reason why the grass isn't as healthy as it could be that too What about this person worried about disturbing the hibernating pollinators in the lawn should they wait until the weather is consistently above 50 degrees before they work the lawn have you heard about early working the lawn hurt hibernating pollinators I wouldn't worry about that I don't think it's going to have that big of an impact and I'm not sure that they're really hibernating in the lawn necessarily Red clover wouldn't be as good because it's not as it's much taller and it doesn't form a turf like surface I like red clover in other places I like it as a plant it's great to plant it in alfalfa to add a little diversity to alfalfa but as far as a legume in a yard I wouldn't recommend that one okay so now I'm just going to tell the youtube users Bob that someone has a question about Bermuda and St. Augustine lawn my goodness that's not North Dakota that's down south okay well zone 5 at least I don't know but they will have Alan Zook in about a week or two he can talk about general lawn same with using trichoderma or Baxillus in the lawn so I think let's try to stay on time tonight and thank you Greta for your presentation very much it was really very interesting I gotta say thank you very much you're welcome have a good evening everyone