U of S Gardenline now open for the season
Do you have a pesky gardening question? The University of Saskatchewan’s Gardenline is now open for the season and is taking calls from domestic gardeners and small-scale commercial growers.
Gardenline offers information and advice on everything green. You can ask about starting seeds, growing vegetables, fruit, houseplants, trees and shrubs, yard and garden plants, and find out how to deal with diseases and pests.
The free phone line (966-5865) will be open until 31 August on Mondays to Thursdays, from 9am-noon and 1-4pm. You can also email questions to gardenline@usask.ca.
Gardenline’s web site also has a ton of very informative articles grouped by category (they are rather awkward to search, but fun to browse). You can find advice on planting early vegetables here.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Last year I took out a building in my yard and put in 2 new buildings in different locations. I will be putting shrub beds and trees in my backyard and have found that the existing undergound sprinklers in my backyard are in the wrong places. Last year we started digging up the sprinkler lines and have a real mess in the backyard. None of the lawn is level from the digging and the many dead areas of grass from my dogs relieving themselves on the grass. What would your suggestion be for the lawn should I take a sodcutter and take all the grass out skim off a few inches of topsoil. Then have new soil hauled in and relevel everything and plant grass again. This seems like a lot of work. Is there an easier way? What would you suggest?
May 30th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Hi, Joanne. I’m not actually affiliated with Gardenline and am not one of their experts, sadly! I just posted the phone number and info for people’s information. I’m not desperately familiar with lawns (I pulled most of mine out last year to put in vegetable/perennial beds instead)–I would mail gardenline@usask.ca to see what they think, but it sounds like it may be a fairly major undertaking to get the space reprepared for grass. You really will want a good level surface with good topsoil and depending how big the surface area we’re talking about is, you might need to get someone with heavy equipment in to do it (especially if you’re planning to reinstall sprinkler lines). If it’s not done properly, it’s not going to take and will just end up looking awful again in a few years (I know that much from personal experience!).
I replaced a fairly small patch of lawn in our back yard a few years ago–it had also had quite a toll taken on it from our dog, and from not getting enough sun from the big maple tree. A few years ago we had to cut off one of the major tree branches, which gave us a lot more light back there, and so I put some new sod down. I scraped off the old grass and we rototilled it before I put in the new sod and I levelled the area basically by hand–this was quite a lot of work, even though it was basically pretty flat and smooth to start off with. So if you’re dealing with fairly rough terrain, I suspect you’re going to need to get some help to level it out and get it ready for seeding again.
My viewpoint as a kitchen gardener is fairly biased, but if it was me looking at it and wondering what to do… :-)…I might think about whether you really want grass in the entire area–maybe you could add some more perennial beds along with the trees and shrub beds (great idea!) or a water feature or put in an edging of long ornamental grass…something so that you wouldn’t need to do so much work preparing a big lawn area. You would still have to prepare the soil for whatever you’re going to put in (beds or whatever), but it might save you some work in the end, especially if you put in perennials which don’t require as much maintenance as grass. Plus, if it’s a little hilly, that can be a good thing for creating a more interesting and varied landscape; you could then maybe just run with it the way it is instead of having to get it really level for a lawn.
But I know where you’re coming from with having dogs; they can make it difficult to get much to grow where they’re out roaring around stepping on stuff. I put down quite a large area of decking because our rambunctious dog would tear stuff up with his claws just from tearing around doing what dogs do! The grass has to be pretty tough to stand up to it. I remember him leaping into one of the beds and snapping off all the tender young ferns in one fell swoop with his big feet. That was it for the ferns that year and I just about cried.
Those are my personal thoughts; take them as you will!
I would call Gardenline on Monday to see what they have to say–good luck and happy gardening!