Reviewed: EcoSmart weed killer vs White Aster

White Aster.

It's a perennial flowering plant that can grow a couple feet tall. Bees like it. It is endangered in Connecticut. In China, it has a history in cough medicine. In my lawn? It's a common weed.

Since it is perennial (comes back year after year), letting the winter cold take care of the problem wont work. It will be here in the spring. It spreads by stolons and rhizomes, so lack of seeds doesn't mean it's not spreading.

I decided to use EcoSmart Organic Lawn Weed Killer
('kills weeds, not lawns!")
It was $10 at Home Depot for one gallon. This was enough to spray almost my entire front yard (the back is fine). The nice thing about this product is that it has NO smell! The color was kinda disturbing, as it looked like I was spraying liquid rust. This is due to the primary ingredient being iron. It is rusty! Iron is toxic to broadleaf weeds like dandelions, but actually provides a quick green up for grass. So if you accidentally spray the lawn, no worries. :)

The down side to this product is the trigger. About a quarter or the bottle through, and my hand was hurting. Also, I can't seem to find it online anywhere. The EcoSmart site still shows many products, but not this one. Their weed and grass killer is listed, but I wouldn't want to try that on my front yard....

Results are still out on the Aster, but EcoSmart took out the dandelions in under 24 hours. I checked today, and everything broadleaf I sprayed was a brown wrecked mess. The Aster has turned darker. I'm hoping it'll die soon. I'll edit this for the results.

How to grow fertilizer!

Yes, the title is odd, but accurate.

I was reading a book earlier, The Organic Lawn Care Manual, and the author had written about how, 50 years ago, white clover was a desirable plant to have in your lawn. To the point that people would mix clover seed into their grass seed when starting a lawn.
We consider it to be a weed because Scotts came out with a "weed-and-feed" that killed clover. The only way to justify the product was to list clover as a nuisance.

Interesting to see how a company can change the mind of the public in order to sell a product....

Anyway, besides being "pretty", the old-schoolers knew that clover was a "nitrogen fixer" (interesting write up here), meaning it pulls nitrogen from the air and deposits it on the plant's roots. Nitrogen is the primary nutrient that causes grass to grow thick & dark. It is also 78% of our air.
Oh snap! Free fertilizer!

Poking around online, you'll see with a lawn of 10% clover, the "weed" will add enough nitrogen to the ground that you will never have to fertilize the lawn. And it is organic nitrogen. And it's free.
Why was I paying $30 a bag before....?
This is the $12 bag that will make my entire lawn fertilize itself. Heck yeah. As always, I'll post the results.

Hey jerky, why the blog?

Kat, my wife, and I have lived in our house for 5 years now. She's handled the roses & flower beds, and the lawn has been my responsibility.
So, now we have beautiful flower beds and a crappy lawn.
Every year I throw some synthetic weed-n-feed at it in the spring, then it gets some high nitrogen junk fertilizer later when it doesn't turn green enough. I mowed when I felt like it (read: when I got nagged to do it), and watered when I remembered. Over the years my lawn has slowly become an ugly wreck that is trying to tell me I'm doing something wrong. I thought the simple solution would be to pass the responsibility to Kat, but she promised divorce was less than impressed with my logic.
So, this spring, I again tried an expensive brand of weed-n-feed in an attempt to get ahead of the weeds. The directions on the back (I know. A guy that reads directions. what the hell, right?!) said that it needed to be watered in with the garden hose, and then it is safe for people and pets to be in the yard once it is dry. OK, easy enough even for me.
Spread the junk, water, and wait. Once dry I let the dogs out back. My little Dachshund, Max, is a low-rider and grass weeds touched his belly as he ran to the nearest weed and shoved his nose into it. That can't be good....


Max in the winter. Despite the pic, he loves the snow.

So I researched (I typed it into Google) the active ingredient 2,4-D. A little poking around shows 2,4-D to be 50% of Agent Orange. Yikes.

There has got to be a better way.....