Monday, June 22, 2009

Watching Grass and Weeds Grow : Week 13

Birds love my buffalo grass lawn, or maybe it's the weed seeds!

This are three species of Arizona doves. The tiny one is an Inca dove. They are often mistaken for the babies of other dove species, but they are just sparrow-sized doves. A mourning dove is at the upper right, and a whitewing is in the foreground. Whitewings are the biggest of the native doves.

Doves: Whitewing, Mourning and Inca

The annual weeds are slowly being eliminated as I hand-pull them. After a section has been cleared of weeds, the buffalo grass is so thick that new ones can't sprout.

I wish I had used a pre-emergent, but it's too late now.

Bermuda grass is still emerging in a few places. Itjavascript:void(0) will continue to be a pest for quite a while.

2 comments:

Shirley Bovshow "EdenMaker" said...

Thanks for your great watering tips for the UC Verde lawn I'm testing. I've been reading your blog...so far so good. It will take a while to see growth.
Shirley Bovshow

Anonymous said...

Amazingly quick coverage you are getting from your little plugs

4 years ago I cleared a patch of crabgrass and plugged it
from a stand of buffalo grass that the birds had brought in the yard
I used about an 8” shovels worth for plugs 2 feet apart had solid turf the next year
This was wild buffalo I think cause it sends up lots of flags
No summer weeds, but I get some clover looking stuff with yellow flowers in the spring
There is some Bermuda creeping from one area but I water so little that it’s sickly and doesn’t send out seed stalks, in part of that area, the Buffalo snuffed out the Bermuda
I think the key is Buff can get by on less water than the Bermuda

I’m in Dallas so a month or so after the spring rains I quit mowing (cut the last of the flags off) and let it grow, we get very little rain in July and August, I watered it twice last summer for a couple of hours each time. With your dry heat you might not get by with so little water, but from what I’ve read the less you water, the deeper the roots go
It looks great in the wind when it gets long,


Last year I seeded the curbside came in great, just about fully turfed now.
with hybrid seeds (no flags) the spurge was so intense because of all the moisture, I gave up on weeding it, not much spurge this year and I plan on watering very little
so I think I’m done with the spurge

K