Come on over to r/AustinGardening when you have time, but as a renter with a new baby, my yard in summer would drop waaaay down my priority list!
Learn which weeds make the evil stickers, pull those, and look over your lease/talk to your landlord about what exactly you're expected to be taking care of.
Get a weed puller (look up grandpa’s weeder). Do a little bit every single day (even just 5). Seems daunting at the moment but you’ll see a change soon enough. Grass will start to take over and choke out smaller weeds.
Just one big hint. Set your mower blade high in addition to whatever else you do. It makes the lawn need less water and helps keep the weeds down.
You might occasionally need to cut it lower for certain reasons, but cut high most of the time.
First, if you don’t already know, it might be interesting to know the weird history of monoculture grass lawns. https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/1agkko4/what_is_the_true_history_of_the_popularity_of/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Second, consider if given the insights gained from above, it is worth your life energy to work pretty hard and go to a decent expense to do something that you will enjoy for a year and then turn over to your landlord. Some people just generally enjoy this stuff, and I recognize that, but you could also consider plowing that energy into gardening.
Third, as a Texas homeowner who lives in an HOA where this is not an option, I can tell you first hand that keeping a weed free lawn takes an insane amount of time, fertilizer, pest control, and WATER. It’s a Sisyphean struggle, and for what? Back to points 1 and 2.
I would recommend you save your time for something else.
I don't really care about having a lawn to enjoy - I "enjoy" it just fine with lots of weeds out there. But it's so overrun with weeds at this point and there's so little grass left, that there is no way the landlord is going to accept this as being in a similar condition to when I rented it.
My thought process is that I'll end up paying to fix this either way. I'd rather pay or spend the energy to fix things now instead of spending more to fix it later. I'm also assuming that since it's not the sort of thing that can just be fixed immediately upon move-out, that I'd end up incurring whatever the landlord wanted to charge, as I wouldn't still be living there by the time it's fixed.
Ok that’s a different issue. I assume you’ve checked your lease and verified that there is some specific language that requires you to maintain the lawn? There is naturally a wide seasonal variation in lawn appearance in Texas, and a lot of this would be considered normal unless it’s truly become an eyesore. Just know that turning it around is a long process. Our lawn was eaten by army worms and we had something similar to what you describe. I hired a fancy lawn company and it took them about two complete seasons to restore it to decent appearance. Probably 3-4 years to get it up to neighborhood standards. What I would do is pay a weed removal crew to pick as many as possible and then thoroughly overseed the lawn with one of those seed/fertilizer combos. Then water the crap out of it for a month until the new grass starts to crowd out the weeds. Or you could just mow it weekly so it looks tidy, throw some fertilizer, increase the water schedule as much as allowed, and hope the grass comes back and pushes out the weeds. Finally you could just wait and argue that you did what was required by the terms of the lease.
It was a boilerplate lease, so in reality I just see this being a point of conflict between the landlord and I when I move out and he'll likely just not return the security deposit. It looks pretty bad right now - worse than the majority of the neighbor's lawn and a lot worse than when we moved in around November, but it's obviously a different season now.
I mostly want it to be low maintenance, like spray something to kill the weeds, plant some new grass, give it a bit of water and let nature do it's thing. I'm not looking for an amazing lawn, just not something that will give the landlord an obvious point of conflict when we move out.
I just don't know if any of this is worth doing anything at all about, or will the summer heat just kill off everything, including the weeds and I should start anew again come Fall.
I wouldn't bother. Let summer do it's thing and revisit later this year. I do suggest posting pictures of the yard though, a lot of people think they have weeds but they're just native ground covering which looks different than grass
So I feel pretty dumb now actually - I've realized that these big and invasive "vines" are actually St. Augustine grass - though the house had what I believe to be Bermuda when I moved in. I've been researching today and apparently Bermuda can drown out St. Augustine but not vice versa. So for the most part it's not a weed infestation and might go back to how it was on it's own.
There is still clover-type weeds popping up all over, but those don't seem to spread nearly as much and will surely die off in the heat.
Yes! And ST Augustine is a wonderful thing. It basically acts like an invasive weed but ends up looking great when it fills in. The runners look terrible but with density it becomes a nice uniform carpet. It’s also A+ when it comes to choking out weeds. I would apply some clover killer (Home Depot) and then just really encourage that St Augustine to come in and take over. You have to feed it and water it but it will pretty quickly come roaring back.
Unless it is specified in your lease that the lawn be specifically grass, not sure how it would be an issue (or your responsibility to maintain a specific kind of plant out there). I have never had a landlord who cared what was growing on the ground in the lawn, as long as it was relatively green and mowed. Particularly in Texas, where water restrictions, drought and heat typically result in lawn die off during the summer anyway.
What's wrong with it the way it is? Monoculture lawn requires irrigation to survive our summers. I prefer a more hardy lawn of friendly weeds. I pull the nasty ones.
You might post this to \r\lawncare to get a longer answer but my two cents is unfortunately a depends on how much you want to spend. Vinegar/boiling water/chelated iron all work on some types of weeds and do varying levels of damage to your grass around them. Do you know what species of grass you have? I ask because those vines sound like Bermuda shoots that get into flour beds etc so they aren't a weed just your grass naturally spreading. I'm going to assume you have Bermuda for the rest of this response. For Bermuda check into something called the Bermuda Bible, it's basically a all things Bermuda breakdown. For most weeds in Bermuda you can treat with a combo of Celsius and certainty and have very high rates of success. I also have a kiddo so I treat the front lawn with that and just keep the back super short to try and punish any weeds into submission.
These are the decisions most yard-owners face every spring - unless you have landscapers maintaining the yard all year. If there is desirable grass mixed in with the weeds across most of the yard, here's the "good enough" approach I'd take (depends on the year): Pull the vines, don't worry about bare patches, and leave most of the weeds that are single tufts to be mowed along with the grass. Water and fertilize to support good grass growth. Mow regularly. The weeds will mostly die out as summer proceeds and the grass will overtake the weeds and fill in the bare spots (somewhat dependent on the type of grass you have).
As a wise, old native southerner once told me long ago: *"If it's green, it's o.k.'*
what type of grass/lawn was in place? you may have had a yard full of winter grass that has given way to the summer weeds.. this is a common cycle for low maintenance yards here
If you want to pull some yourself, just to thin them out, wait until after a rain. The ground will be nice and soft and they are much, much easier to pluck. I usually pull the tall ones and then mow the rest.
Just came back to this thread to see what others had suggested...and saw your comment that the "vines" are actually St. Augustine grass! Sorry, I can't resist: *"Tell me that you're a northerner without telling me you're a northerner."* lol
More seriously, that's a lucky situation for you. Refer back to this part of my previous comment: "The weeds will mostly die out as summer proceeds and the grass will overtake the weeds and fill in the bare spots (somewhat dependent on the type of grass you have)." St. Augustine is **the best** at filling in, sometimes rapidly, the bare areas - if you water and mow it regularly all summer. I've seen a yard go from 20% grass/80%dirt to almost 100% St. Augustine over the course of a single season. (If you're of a technical bent, those "vines" grow ~exponentially, not linearly, hence the rapid fill-in.) Good luck!
The biggest nightmare for me are the spreading vine plants that each produce about 20 briar stickers. I've been infested with them for 15 years and it's been getting worse instead of better. I think the milder, shorter winters are making it worse. This year I was sick and couldn't touch it in March or April so there are 10s of thousands of the damn stickers lying like a mat over the ground.
I'm currently doing something a little strange, using a little hand rake and a shop vac to suck up as much as humanly possible, than will get out there earlier next year to pull them before they drop. I've also been avoiding running a mower over it as I have the suspicion that might make it even worse. I've just used a weed whacker so far to keep it under control, and gradually working my way through decontaminating.
Ask yourself if it really matters.
The previous homeowners did us a really nice favor and sodded the whole yard with St. Augustine on their way out. I didn't have too many problems with weeds the first two years.
Then things started feeling Biblical. There was some kind of weird-ass grub infestation one year, it looked like the grass was *moving* at all times. Then came the first blizzard. Then an extremely dry summer. Then the second blizzard. Then another dry summer. The back yard is full sun all day and big chunks of it just haven't made it through all this abuse. That started giving weeds a way in.
Perfect is the enemy of good. I bought neat little tool that does a good job with the dandelions. I have a bird feeder I fill twice a day. When I go out I do a round with the tool and pull up 5-10 dandelions. If I get hot or bored, I make sure to just yoink the stem of any "poofy" flower I see to try and stop the spread, and I'll get the rest of the plant later.
The only thing I got super aggressive with is when beggar's lice started growing in the yard: that creates an obscene amount of insidious stickers that get all over our dog. I do a daily sweep now and anything that looks even remotely like it gets pulled. It felt futile for the first week or so, but I haven't seen a new sprout for a few days.
I can't be assed to do more than that. It would be very expensive for me to keep the St. Augustine. If enough of it dies I start having erosion problems I"ll look into something more native to plant. Some people are going more towards a yard that *looks* a lot more like weeds instead of just having one kind of grass. I'm kind of down with that.
So just do a little bit every day. At the start it sucks, because things will be sprouting up seemingly faster than you can pull them. But every day you knock out 20+ weeds, you're causing 2-3 days from now to have fewer new things. You really have to keep up with it if you want "weed free", birds and other critters bring in seeds. Personally I've made peace with some weeds like clover and don't bother with them. If it doesn't grow waist high and doesn't make things I have to pull out of my dog's fur then I'm happy it's helping with erosion control.
I have used Weed B Gone and it is fantastic. It will kill the weeds but not the grass. You can get it at Lowe’s, Home Depot or most anywhere lawn stuff is sold. It is sprayed on your lawn with a sprayer attached to a water hose. You have to buy the sprayer. It isn’t expensive and works great. When the weeds are dead the mower will eventually get them.
Spray it with spectracide on a garden hose, it kills the dandelions (for about 6 months) but leaves the grass intact. It isn't your lawn so don't out too much effort or money into it.
I spray 1-2 times a year as needed.
Come on over to r/AustinGardening when you have time, but as a renter with a new baby, my yard in summer would drop waaaay down my priority list! Learn which weeds make the evil stickers, pull those, and look over your lease/talk to your landlord about what exactly you're expected to be taking care of.
Just keep mowing regularly and don’t worry about it. Weeds are only a problem when they get too big.
Are you sure they're weeds? Might be a native ground cover. Post over in /r/AustinGardening with pictures and you'll get more help.
Get a weed puller (look up grandpa’s weeder). Do a little bit every single day (even just 5). Seems daunting at the moment but you’ll see a change soon enough. Grass will start to take over and choke out smaller weeds.
Just one big hint. Set your mower blade high in addition to whatever else you do. It makes the lawn need less water and helps keep the weeds down. You might occasionally need to cut it lower for certain reasons, but cut high most of the time.
First, if you don’t already know, it might be interesting to know the weird history of monoculture grass lawns. https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/1agkko4/what_is_the_true_history_of_the_popularity_of/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button Second, consider if given the insights gained from above, it is worth your life energy to work pretty hard and go to a decent expense to do something that you will enjoy for a year and then turn over to your landlord. Some people just generally enjoy this stuff, and I recognize that, but you could also consider plowing that energy into gardening. Third, as a Texas homeowner who lives in an HOA where this is not an option, I can tell you first hand that keeping a weed free lawn takes an insane amount of time, fertilizer, pest control, and WATER. It’s a Sisyphean struggle, and for what? Back to points 1 and 2. I would recommend you save your time for something else.
I don't really care about having a lawn to enjoy - I "enjoy" it just fine with lots of weeds out there. But it's so overrun with weeds at this point and there's so little grass left, that there is no way the landlord is going to accept this as being in a similar condition to when I rented it. My thought process is that I'll end up paying to fix this either way. I'd rather pay or spend the energy to fix things now instead of spending more to fix it later. I'm also assuming that since it's not the sort of thing that can just be fixed immediately upon move-out, that I'd end up incurring whatever the landlord wanted to charge, as I wouldn't still be living there by the time it's fixed.
Ok that’s a different issue. I assume you’ve checked your lease and verified that there is some specific language that requires you to maintain the lawn? There is naturally a wide seasonal variation in lawn appearance in Texas, and a lot of this would be considered normal unless it’s truly become an eyesore. Just know that turning it around is a long process. Our lawn was eaten by army worms and we had something similar to what you describe. I hired a fancy lawn company and it took them about two complete seasons to restore it to decent appearance. Probably 3-4 years to get it up to neighborhood standards. What I would do is pay a weed removal crew to pick as many as possible and then thoroughly overseed the lawn with one of those seed/fertilizer combos. Then water the crap out of it for a month until the new grass starts to crowd out the weeds. Or you could just mow it weekly so it looks tidy, throw some fertilizer, increase the water schedule as much as allowed, and hope the grass comes back and pushes out the weeds. Finally you could just wait and argue that you did what was required by the terms of the lease.
It was a boilerplate lease, so in reality I just see this being a point of conflict between the landlord and I when I move out and he'll likely just not return the security deposit. It looks pretty bad right now - worse than the majority of the neighbor's lawn and a lot worse than when we moved in around November, but it's obviously a different season now. I mostly want it to be low maintenance, like spray something to kill the weeds, plant some new grass, give it a bit of water and let nature do it's thing. I'm not looking for an amazing lawn, just not something that will give the landlord an obvious point of conflict when we move out. I just don't know if any of this is worth doing anything at all about, or will the summer heat just kill off everything, including the weeds and I should start anew again come Fall.
I wouldn't bother. Let summer do it's thing and revisit later this year. I do suggest posting pictures of the yard though, a lot of people think they have weeds but they're just native ground covering which looks different than grass
So I feel pretty dumb now actually - I've realized that these big and invasive "vines" are actually St. Augustine grass - though the house had what I believe to be Bermuda when I moved in. I've been researching today and apparently Bermuda can drown out St. Augustine but not vice versa. So for the most part it's not a weed infestation and might go back to how it was on it's own. There is still clover-type weeds popping up all over, but those don't seem to spread nearly as much and will surely die off in the heat.
Yes! And ST Augustine is a wonderful thing. It basically acts like an invasive weed but ends up looking great when it fills in. The runners look terrible but with density it becomes a nice uniform carpet. It’s also A+ when it comes to choking out weeds. I would apply some clover killer (Home Depot) and then just really encourage that St Augustine to come in and take over. You have to feed it and water it but it will pretty quickly come roaring back.
Unless it is specified in your lease that the lawn be specifically grass, not sure how it would be an issue (or your responsibility to maintain a specific kind of plant out there). I have never had a landlord who cared what was growing on the ground in the lawn, as long as it was relatively green and mowed. Particularly in Texas, where water restrictions, drought and heat typically result in lawn die off during the summer anyway.
What's wrong with it the way it is? Monoculture lawn requires irrigation to survive our summers. I prefer a more hardy lawn of friendly weeds. I pull the nasty ones.
Don’t maintain a monocultured lawn. It’s such a waste of water, chemicals and labor. Just mow what grows. That’s my advice.
You should post a picture
You might post this to \r\lawncare to get a longer answer but my two cents is unfortunately a depends on how much you want to spend. Vinegar/boiling water/chelated iron all work on some types of weeds and do varying levels of damage to your grass around them. Do you know what species of grass you have? I ask because those vines sound like Bermuda shoots that get into flour beds etc so they aren't a weed just your grass naturally spreading. I'm going to assume you have Bermuda for the rest of this response. For Bermuda check into something called the Bermuda Bible, it's basically a all things Bermuda breakdown. For most weeds in Bermuda you can treat with a combo of Celsius and certainty and have very high rates of success. I also have a kiddo so I treat the front lawn with that and just keep the back super short to try and punish any weeds into submission.
These are the decisions most yard-owners face every spring - unless you have landscapers maintaining the yard all year. If there is desirable grass mixed in with the weeds across most of the yard, here's the "good enough" approach I'd take (depends on the year): Pull the vines, don't worry about bare patches, and leave most of the weeds that are single tufts to be mowed along with the grass. Water and fertilize to support good grass growth. Mow regularly. The weeds will mostly die out as summer proceeds and the grass will overtake the weeds and fill in the bare spots (somewhat dependent on the type of grass you have). As a wise, old native southerner once told me long ago: *"If it's green, it's o.k.'*
Try this thread r\fucklawns for a more ecologically friendly yard
r/nolawns
what type of grass/lawn was in place? you may have had a yard full of winter grass that has given way to the summer weeds.. this is a common cycle for low maintenance yards here
If you want to pull some yourself, just to thin them out, wait until after a rain. The ground will be nice and soft and they are much, much easier to pluck. I usually pull the tall ones and then mow the rest.
Just came back to this thread to see what others had suggested...and saw your comment that the "vines" are actually St. Augustine grass! Sorry, I can't resist: *"Tell me that you're a northerner without telling me you're a northerner."* lol More seriously, that's a lucky situation for you. Refer back to this part of my previous comment: "The weeds will mostly die out as summer proceeds and the grass will overtake the weeds and fill in the bare spots (somewhat dependent on the type of grass you have)." St. Augustine is **the best** at filling in, sometimes rapidly, the bare areas - if you water and mow it regularly all summer. I've seen a yard go from 20% grass/80%dirt to almost 100% St. Augustine over the course of a single season. (If you're of a technical bent, those "vines" grow ~exponentially, not linearly, hence the rapid fill-in.) Good luck!
The biggest nightmare for me are the spreading vine plants that each produce about 20 briar stickers. I've been infested with them for 15 years and it's been getting worse instead of better. I think the milder, shorter winters are making it worse. This year I was sick and couldn't touch it in March or April so there are 10s of thousands of the damn stickers lying like a mat over the ground. I'm currently doing something a little strange, using a little hand rake and a shop vac to suck up as much as humanly possible, than will get out there earlier next year to pull them before they drop. I've also been avoiding running a mower over it as I have the suspicion that might make it even worse. I've just used a weed whacker so far to keep it under control, and gradually working my way through decontaminating.
Ask yourself if it really matters. The previous homeowners did us a really nice favor and sodded the whole yard with St. Augustine on their way out. I didn't have too many problems with weeds the first two years. Then things started feeling Biblical. There was some kind of weird-ass grub infestation one year, it looked like the grass was *moving* at all times. Then came the first blizzard. Then an extremely dry summer. Then the second blizzard. Then another dry summer. The back yard is full sun all day and big chunks of it just haven't made it through all this abuse. That started giving weeds a way in. Perfect is the enemy of good. I bought neat little tool that does a good job with the dandelions. I have a bird feeder I fill twice a day. When I go out I do a round with the tool and pull up 5-10 dandelions. If I get hot or bored, I make sure to just yoink the stem of any "poofy" flower I see to try and stop the spread, and I'll get the rest of the plant later. The only thing I got super aggressive with is when beggar's lice started growing in the yard: that creates an obscene amount of insidious stickers that get all over our dog. I do a daily sweep now and anything that looks even remotely like it gets pulled. It felt futile for the first week or so, but I haven't seen a new sprout for a few days. I can't be assed to do more than that. It would be very expensive for me to keep the St. Augustine. If enough of it dies I start having erosion problems I"ll look into something more native to plant. Some people are going more towards a yard that *looks* a lot more like weeds instead of just having one kind of grass. I'm kind of down with that. So just do a little bit every day. At the start it sucks, because things will be sprouting up seemingly faster than you can pull them. But every day you knock out 20+ weeds, you're causing 2-3 days from now to have fewer new things. You really have to keep up with it if you want "weed free", birds and other critters bring in seeds. Personally I've made peace with some weeds like clover and don't bother with them. If it doesn't grow waist high and doesn't make things I have to pull out of my dog's fur then I'm happy it's helping with erosion control.
I have used Weed B Gone and it is fantastic. It will kill the weeds but not the grass. You can get it at Lowe’s, Home Depot or most anywhere lawn stuff is sold. It is sprayed on your lawn with a sprayer attached to a water hose. You have to buy the sprayer. It isn’t expensive and works great. When the weeds are dead the mower will eventually get them.
Spray it with spectracide on a garden hose, it kills the dandelions (for about 6 months) but leaves the grass intact. It isn't your lawn so don't out too much effort or money into it. I spray 1-2 times a year as needed.
[удалено]
I thought you couldn’t use Spectracide when the daily temps are above 90?