I live in Houston, Texas and my yard is composed of maybe 50% St. Augustine grass, and 50% weeds that have over the last ten years. I have resolved that I may have to start over and buy sod for my front lawn. I need to know what is this going to cost? or maybe I should just continue to pick weeds
"bob callaway" wrote in news:JvadnaamnOlzEm3WnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
Why not make a deck or patio and some flower beds? I live in Jersey, so no experience with Texas, but it should be moist enough in Houston to do something like that.
There's a couple of guys on Houston Craigslist that advertise St Augustine sod for ~$120 per pallet. A pallet covers (according to them) 450 sq ft. The price includes delivery and installation.
Here's an ad from just today (16 May)
You live in a hot area where water is probably expensive ? Why not consider abandoning the conventional lawn and creating a xeriscapic landscape instead. A LOT of information on Xeriscaping is available on-line. Would save water and look a lot more interesting than sod. Just my .02.
Hypatia
How often do you feed the lawn?
You need to know a cost but are to dam lazy to get a bid? Yea like you even included sq ft. I say pick weeds this summer.
I would suggest that no matter what you do today, but the end of the summer, you will be back to where you are now if you don't correct the underlying problem.
I can't tell from here what that problem or problems may be, but I suspect that you need to start with a sustainable plan, a plan that fits your soil and weather conditions and your willingness and ability to maintain it.
Assuming it is not real hot and dry, St. Augustine is fairly easy to rehab. We did so with our Florida lawn...had mostly broadleaf weeds, like dollar weed. St. Aug. grows like a weed, so it fills in better than a lot of lawn grasses. As weeds are killed, plugging can often fill in quickly and is a lot easier to do than new sod. Fertilize 3x year, cut high, water deeply 1x week if no rain. Weed B Gone for southern lawns is good, if you don't have Floratam. There are lots of mixtures, so check the label. One appl. took down most of our weeds, and spot treatment for problem areas. Know that the present crop of weeds has dropped seed, so those will germinate and require some care - pulling one weed by hand might save hundreds or thousands of weeds from dropping, so it is useful for the occasional weed. Proper mowing, esp. in hot, dry weather can avoid lots of weed growth, as it helps avoid water loss and keeps weed seed from getting as much sun.
I agree. A healthy lawn on decent soil that is properly fetilized, watered, etc will grow dense and crowd out the weeds so that you just have some each year that you can spot treat once or twice a year with a tank sprayer. On the other hand, if you have gravel instead of topsoil, PH way out of whack, etc, you'll have difficulty growing grass. You can spend some $$ upfront to fix that, or spen a lot more over a decade and still have a problem lawn.
If there is any agricultural extension service or similar that is available, they usually offer free advice, you can take them soil samples to test, turf sections to look at, etc. Try looking in county pages of the phone book.
That's been my solution. Pick the weeds and the grass takes over. Stay away from herbicides.
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