Browse Forums Landscape & Garden Design 1 Mar 31, 2014 11:50 pm Hi Folks, new member to the forum here. I am in Adelaide with a couch lawn front and back. Front lawn was laid April last year with instant turf, and the back was stolonized Oct 2013. I have a mostly clay-type soil, that I tilled and added some composted material prior to planting. This winter I would like to turn my focus to improving my soil structure. I have been doing some research both on this site and various other sites (mostly N American) and I am interested in the benefits of sea kelp with a surfactant like baby shampoo to soften the soil and 'open' the soil structure on a microscopic level by binding particles and creating mini fissures. I am interested in Fu's mantra of 'feeding the soil and not the plant'. I am also learning the benefits of soil microbes and the addition of molasses. My question is this; can a couch lawn be sustained purely by ensuring the soil is in ideal condition, effectively doing away with additional fertilisers? It is my understanding that couch (bermuda grass) has the most requirement for N applications of all the turf grass species. Will adding synthetic N destroy any beneficial soil microbes that I create? Background of current practices; -Lawn is mowed low and mowed often with a cylinder mower, always mulched mowed -Lawn is only watered when it shows signs of wilt. I watered it for the first time on Friday for the first time in almost a month. During the weeks of extreme heat (consecutive 40C+) it would normally go 5 days before it needed water again. -Fert program during summer was half rates (7.5g/m2) of 36-0-8 urea based fert every 3 weeks. Discuss. We done our landscaping a year back using Couch, over the recent months I have noticed another type of grass growing with the Couch in a 2x2m radius. I'm thinking the… 0 9239 I've dug some footings to embed a post anchor into. My holes are around 450mm deep which I'll put a 200mm stirrup into. The bottom of these holes seem firm enough. … 0 1556 the leaves that are now underground go yellow, the tips that poke through photosynthesise and have chlorophyll, same reason they grow rhubarb in the dark. 5 2912 |