Not sure if this question has been asked here already, but just wondering if you can apply lawn fertilizer and a separate grub control product at the same time. A few days ago, we just applied the "Scotts Super Turf Builder Summerguard - With Bug Control To Kill Ants, Fleas, and Ticks" which is a 30-0-4 formula. We also have a bag of the "Bayer Advanced Season Long Grub Control Plus Turf Revitalizer" which is a
6-0-1 formula.
The "Scotts Summerguard" doesn't kill grubs, and so we have to use the separate grub control. to try to kill the grubs, because last September we had a pesky skunk that ripped up and mutilated our yard every night last September, October, and November.
On the back of the "Bayer Advanced Grub Control" bag, it states that the product has to be applied before August 15th. So my question is, should we wait another week or so before applying the grub control, or can it be applied now? The "Scotts Summerguard" has 30% percent nitrogen, and the "Bayer Grub Control" had 6% percent nitrogen. If we apply the "Bayer Grub Control" right now, won't that be too much nitrogen ( 36% percent nitrogen in one weeks time ), for the lawn to handle??
Not knowing either product, only if lb/1,000 ft sq are the same would this add up to the high nitrogen value,
I'm not a Scotts fan because while they may be good products, they probably cost twice as much and fertilizing 4 times a year is work. I like to treat each problem separately, not carpet bomb my lawn.
You could also do away with the lawn entirely and redesign with plants appropriate to your area. Here in So. Calif., especially in ""green" cities like Santa Monica, there is a big move to convert to xeriscapic designs. These are suitable for what is, after all, a desert (which only has water thanks to Mulholland and others, not to forget the speculators who bought up land in advance of water arriving).
This city actually pays half (I think) the cost of conversion, if you present a substantive plan that shows you know what you're doing, and follow through to demonstrable results.
Other parts of the country could do the same with area-appropriate plantings.
It's a shocker to realize that THE BIGGEST CROP IN THE U.S. IS TURF GRASS. The money spent on water, fertilizer, pesticides, etc.etc. is in the billions. This is 2011. It is no longer a mark of prestige to have the greenest, lushest lawn in the 'burb.
Savvy parents do not let their children play on the lawns of friends whose parents use toxic chemicals. For obvious reasons.
The real question is what do we get, and what does it cost. The cost is paid for with everybody's taxes, and everybody in the U.S. benefits from the water conservation. Central Valley farmers benefit, which allows them to put vegetables and fruit on your table. Fisheries benefit, which means fish, such as salmon, are available to feed your family. The environment benefits by maintaining bio-diversity, and recharging aquifers. And the people of Southern California benefit, because when they open their tap, there is water to drink or bath in. It's a societal approach, not a Tea Bagger approach.
Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture (Paperback) by Toby Hemenway
CHAPTER FIVE
Catching, Conserving, and Using Water
In truth, our planet should be called Water, not Earth. About 70 percent of the globe is blanketed by this life-giving liquid, roughly 331 million cubic miles of it. But most of that is not available to us. All but 3 percent of Earth's water is salty; and, of the remaining dab of fresh water, three-quarters is locked in ice. It gets worse. About half of what's left, Earth's unfrozen fresh water, is 2,500 feet or more below ground, embedded in rock. That's too deep to recover economically. Are you following these shrinking numbers? The accessible fresh water in lakes, rivers, groundwater, and the atmosphere makes up only half of one-quarter of 3 percent?for non-Einsteins, that works out to 0.375 percent?of Earth's total water. It's precious stuff.
TROPIC OF CHAOS: Climate change and the New Geography of Violence
142 TROPIC OF CHAOS
Neoliberalism and Death by Cotton
The farmers in Telangana all grow genetically modified Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton, a product of the agricultural giant Monsanto.The new cotton became available a few years back. Although advertised as not needing pesticides, it does. At first it boosted output and incomes, but after a few years, incomes fell and the new cotton became a curse. Its roots penetrate deep into the soil, sucking up all the nutrients. Before long the farmers need large amounts of artificial fertilizer?and that means taking loans. Scholars call this the "vicious cycle of chemical agriculture."
"We know that after three or four years, the land will be dead," said Linga Reddy Sama, whose family are Hindu migrants rather than of the local tribal Gond people. The farmers in these villages know they are mining the soil, extracting and exporting its nutrition in the form of cheap cotton. While their crops decline, their debts increase. And in the worst of cases, farmers are killing themselves. This is the catastrophic convergence at the local scale, at the scale of specific crops and actual families.
INDIA'S DROUGHT REBELS 143
Had anyone committed suicide in Jaamni? Yes, a man named Anjanna, who was about forty-five years old and had killed himself the previous year by drinking pesticide. "He killed himself to escape his debts," said one of the farmers. "Now his wife and grown son are in Maharashtra State working as farm laborers."
The problem, again, comes back to water. In recent years, irrigation has suffered under a wave of neoliberal disinvestment. The state has removed important subsidies from small farmers; as result, thousands of them have killed themselves.
The process went like this; Starting in 1991 the Indian government began a process of economic liberalization. Efficiency became the watch-word; the state cut power subsidies to farmers. With that, running pumps for wells and irrigation became more expensive. To cope, farmers started taking loans from local banks or usurious moneylenders.29 The neoliberal withdrawal of developmentalist policies meant that local irrigation systems fell into dilapidation. With bad irrigation works soon the norm, farmers turned to drilling privately-funded wells and taking groundwater. This was typically done on an ad hoc and individual or village-by-village basis, with little planning or proper water management. As a result, the aquifers soon fell into decline. These private coping strategies require private capital. To drill wells, farmers had to borrow from local moneylenders?often at exorbitant rates. Now, when crops fail or wells run dry, which is becoming more common due to climate change, farmers cannot repay their debts.
By the late 1990s, many farmers had run out of options?they were too far in arrears to borrow more, too broke to produce crops. For thousands, the only escape from this debt trap came in the form of suicide?often by swallowing pesticides. According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau, 150,000 Indian farmers killed themselves between 1997 and 2005. But as Anuradha Mittal reports, "Farmers' organizations believe the number of suicides to be even greater."30 In Andhra Pradesh, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 farmers killed themselves between 1998 and
2004. As one creditor told the New York Times, "Many moneylenders have made a whole lot of money. . . . Farmers, many of them, are ruined."31
144 TROPIC OF CHAOS
When the links between drought, irrigation, debt, and suicide were becoming clear a dozen years ago, the Political and Economic Weekly investigated. "A study of 50 deceased farmers in Warangal District [near Adilabad] shows that well [water] is the largest source of irrigation forabout three-fourths of the farmers. Only about one-third of the wells were dug under the subsidy schemes of the government. In the rest of the cases farmers themselves have borne the expenses for digging of wells. Besides this the depletion of groundwater in recent years has necessitated deepening of wells and laying of in-well bores."
The cost of such a well in the late 1990s averaged between $1,400 and $3,000.32 As a World Bank study on drought and climate change in Andhra Pradesh found, that means debt. The Bank noted, "Household responses to drought have been largely reactive and do little to build longterm drought resilience. Credit remains the most common coping response to drought." In fact, 68 percent of households in the study took loans due to drought, with large landholders borrowing "from formal sources (such as banks), while the landless and small farmers borrow from moneylenders at inflated interest rates."33 Not only are the rates usurious, but these more informal contracts rely on brutal and humiliating enforcement mechanisms.
by my rough calculation that comes to 1.28 billion liters of accessible fresh water per person. that sounds like plenty, but i suspect when you start tallying up lakes, rivers, wetlands and the water needed to keep the plants growing that feed and support us and all the rest of the creatures we rely upon that number is going to rapidly shrink.
The exploitation of indigenous peoples by international corporations has been going on for nearly a century. Big Ag makes a deal with the local dictator to let them come in & grow [peanuts] [cotton] [coffee] whatever, on an industrial scale. So the little subsistence farmer who has been feeding his family home-grown (horrors! ORGANIC!) food these many centuries is persuaded to turn over his land to Big Ag. They show him how to Do Things on an industrial scale. Soon it becomes apparent that he has to buy fuel for his tractor, fertilizer, pesticides, all the usual s***t.
When the land has been exhausted and/or when the market for the exploitation crop crashes, Big Ag pulls out and the farmer is left with ruined land, often huge debts, and generally a far worse life than he and family had when Big Ag greased the local dictator's hand to let them come in.
This game has been played for many centuries and was a key part of European colonisation of the other continents. In the early days of colonialism they were more direct, the corporation would steal the land and/or enslave the locals, as overt slavery became less popular the approach was to get the indigenes to work the land and to become consumers of the products of European factories.
The local chiefs, rajahs and feudal lords got their cut for allowing this and in some cases participated directly by supplying forced labour. For a good example of the massive scale that this was done long before the phrase multinational corporation was coined see the East India Company.
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the colonial era European governments openly supported the exploiters with royal and parliamentary authority and would supply muscle and guns if the Company troops needed help subduing any local potentate who didn't want to play. Nearly everybody considered this A Good Thing and the proper role for whites who were after all superior. The modern version is slightly more subtle.
I'm looking for an answer to the same question. I applied Scotts Summerguar d tonight and, although I'm a fanatic with my lawncare, noticed patches of dead grass that must've surfaced since yesterday. I suspect grubs are under neath the soil surface and have attacked the root system of the grass, ther eby the patches. Consequently, I bought Grubex several weeks ago to apply b ut have been late in getting it down on the lawn. Can I apply it within a d ay over the Summerguard or should I wait longer?
Respectfully, Frank only has addressed the original question without digres sing from the issue at hand...thanks all...
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