When we purchased our first house in 2014 I didn't know what I was getting myself into with the lawn. The neighborhood is basically exclusively fine fescue (well actually it's about 60% FF and 40% plantain, dandelion, crabgrass oxalis, clover and spruge). Our front lawn was ugly, but just as ugly as the rest of the street. So I did what any other new home owner would do and started buying some some Scotts Turf Builder and set the dial to 3.25 (or whatever it is) and hammered the lawn I a couple times in spring and then early summer and again in fall. I was cutting at the middle setting on my lawn mower because why not and thought watering for 15 minutes with a $15 oscillating sprinkler. I knew nothing other than I didn't want to have an embarrassing front lawn. I grew up with a nice kbg irrigated green lawn (not that I knew what kbg was at this point).
The clover was horrendous, I didn't even see all the dandelions my first spring (at the beginning at least) because there was so much clover.
And then all of a sudden my yard was engulfed by the yellow scourge of the dandelions. So I drove on down to Canadian Tire and bought a weed hound. I pulled 4 or 5 recycling bins worth of deeply established weeds in my rock hard clay soil. I went through two weed hounds because I bent the shafts both times. One old guy on my street who I'd never seen came up to me and told me I'm nuts buy some weed killer.
I wish I knew who that old guy was, because this is all his fault! And so my lawn care obsession began.
I wasn't going to let that guy tell me what to do, I am going to make this a gorgeous lawn damnit!! Couple more weeks of pulling weeds I went down to the states and bought some weed b gon. That ended the clover story. The next couple summers I was away on jobs sires, slowly making progress on the lawn.
More turf builder pro, and more weed pulling. More bad watering. But the lawn was starting to improve a bit, I started having some colour to it, but man it was thigh because I had pulled so. many. weeds.
So more weeds crept in but overall the weed war was under control. At this point I realized the previous owners probably never touched the lawn, and this depleted sad patch of clay was likely all the original grass from when the house was built some 40 years previous.
As I got more annoyed by the lawn making only marginal gains I bought a book "The Lawn Bible" I learned quite a bit, but many I was not ready for all that information, but I did take away that I really need a soil test... But had no idea how or where.
Fast forward another year to 2017 and all this tall hard grass was making the rest of my dainty FF look like crap. I assumed like everyone else it was crabgrass, and that is how I discovered Allyn Hane on the old YouTube. Suddenly things really started to change. I watched that first project lawn playlist probably 30 times. Started mowing high, and questioning how and why I was fertilizering, and most importantly learned that 10 min watering didn't do jack.
Oh ya, that tall hard grass I finally figured out next year.
By the end of summer in 2017, the lawn looked a bit better. I wasted some time overseeding first week of April and watering 2 or 3 times total. But my wife was a couple months pregnant with our first and we were preparing to do some intense backyard renovations, so the yard kind of stayed where it was until 2018.
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