The Compost Bin

Early spring is a busy time of the year for most gardeners. You're trying to start seeds, cleaning up leftover leaves in the yard and just generally getting ready to start growing stuff. One of the spring chores that is kind of fun is trimming the ornamental grasses.

It's important to trim ornamental grasses to get ready for the new growth. Plus they also look a lot better with a crew cut as opposed to the crazy long brown 'do of the winter.

My only advice for doing this is to use a sharp tool and wear gloves. Ornamental grass can wreck havoc on dry chapped winter hands.

And here's a video from TheCompostBin archive about how to trim your grasses. I made this last year and it's amazing to see how much the plant has grown since then. If I get growth like that again I may split the grass to make two plants out of one. And I may even make a video of it.

At the end of winter or in early spring, it's a good time to trim your ornamental grass. Cutting away the dried up grass makes room for new growth.

You can trim your ornamental grass with hedge clippers, a very sharp knife or even plain old scissors just like I'm using in this video.

After a pool renovation that lasted way too long this summer, I was left with a great looking pool but not one blade of grass.

The workers and all the heavy machinery completely destroyed my lawn. It's really not their fault because I had them do some grading of the yard so they scooped away the lawn and all the top soil along with it.

The estimate for new sod was crazy ($$$) and after all the pool work was done, it just wasn't in the budget. I thought about putting down grass seed on the concrete-like dirt that I was left with but decided it would be a waste. I didn't want a lawn that was more weed than grass so I did some research. Terraseeding was the solution I was looking for.

Now this isn't that green paint looking stuff that's sprayed along highways after construction is done. I think you could spray that Franken-grass on cement and you'd still have lawn in like an hour or something. No thanks.

Mulch Express USA, the vendor I chose, describes Terraseeding like this, "A 1-inch layer of Turf Start soil mix impregnated with seed is blown in using a patented computer calibrated Seed Injection System." The soil mix was nice a dark and actually looked like compost. And the guy with the hose kept the mixture out of my flower beds and put it down exactly how I wanted. That sounded great to me and it was only a 1/3 of the cost of having sod put down. All I had to do was keep it moist until the seeds germinated and I'd have a lush lawn.

I put the sprinklers on twice a day for about a half an hour and after 1 week the seeds germinated. After 4 weeks I had a 3 inch high lawn. I couldn't be happier with my new grass. Even now in December, it still looks pretty lush. Next spring my yard should look great.