DIY Life

I am not a weed vigilante. I do not obsessively seek to control the weeds in my yard. "Live and let live" is usually my philosophy.

Some weeds, however, are just begging for a fight. They spread everywhere and are super-tough to eradicate. Crabgrass (Digitaria spp.) has to be one of the top weeds on most gardeners' lists. It's pretty harmless-looking, pretty even. But it spreads relentlessly by seed, taking over patches of lawn and spreading into garden beds.

Got a crabgrass problem? Check out the following tips and reign it in!

Your front yard doesn't have to be perfectly manicured or professionally landscaped to look good. It is, however, your public face -- of sorts. Plus, your neighbors are forced to look at whatever you put out there!

Be a good neighbor: banish the following items from your front yard.

1. Plastic foliage. I'm talking anything you got from a craft store. Like this, for example. Plastic ivy. Faux dried sunflowers. Silk chrysanthemums. Plastic wreaths. Fake autumn leaves strung into streamers. Shudder.

Plastic flowers are tacky in the garden. They're unnecessary. After all, you have Mother Nature at your disposal! Why choose fake flowers? Finally, they evoke the cemetery. Enough said.

Summer vacation keeps rolling along. How long until your kids go back to school? Are they spending too much time lounging on the couch? Here are a bunch of summer projects to trick your kids away from their air-conditioned sanctuary and out into the great outdoors of, er, your backyard.

Okay, okay. So the backyard is not the great outdoors. True. But the main thing is to get the kiddos out in the fresh air, learning about nature, and learning about the noble pursuit of maintaining a garden.

Getting their hands dirty
1. Ask them to help with the weeding. Pay them a small amount of pocket money for their time.

"Home, home on the raaange." Camping, campfires, and campfire songs are so much a part of the American summer. Kids especially love this stuff. "Can we go camping, Mom/Dad? Can we? Can we? Can we?"

Don't have the budget/energy/time to drag the whole family to a real campground? Consider building a stay-cation-style camp site at home. You can do this inside, or try setting up outside on the lawn or on your porch, deck, or patio. Invite all the kids' friends and make a party out of it!

Fake fire will be your centerpiece. I found suggestions on building a faux campfire at TheMeBuilders.com and at Cadvisor.com. This basically involves positioning a fan and some red-colored lightbulbs underneath your "campfire" (bundle of logs). A piece of colored silk scarf flickers and billows when the fan is turned on. Never, ever leave the setup unattended in case the bulbs overheat.

At my house, we really try our best to live in an environmentally friendly way, for our health and the Earth's. We eat local, fresh food as much as we can, we never use chemicals on our lawn or plants, we don't clean the house with chemicals, and we have quite the raging compost pile.

It seems that we got a bit overzealous with the composting, in fact. Last fall, after carving a stunning Jack-o-lantern, we responsibly dumped the innards of the pumpkin into our composter.

Throughout the autumn, we had several pumpkins displayed on our walkway and stoop. When it was time to put up the Christmas decorations, we plopped the pumpkins in the composter. Follow me after the break; I'm going somewhere with this...

When he first learned that leaving mowed grass right on a newly cut lawn is healthier for your grass, my husband was thrilled. We have a large yard and he was so tired of raking.

The leftover cuttings act like mulch for your lawn, helping it retain moisture and giving it valuable nutrients. It's just one of eight things you can do to have a healthy, eco-friendly lawn.

Other tips include:

• setting your mower to cut the grass no shorter than 3 inches
• using a reel lawnmower
• watering early in the day, only when needed
• putting up a bird feeder to reduce pests
• growing the right type of grass for your region
• aerating the soil regularly

At our house, we are nothing if not cheap and lazy (though I prefer the terms frugal and laid-back), which is why I also like this very detailed tutorial from richsoil.com on how to have a nice organic lawn the cheap and lazy way. Finally, if weeds are the only thing that stand between you and a chemical-free lawn, try a few of our own tricks for handling weeds without chemical herbicides.

Mowers, edgers, leaf-blowers. Sod, plug, aerate, de-thatch. Irrigate, seed, fertilize, weed.

Phew! Makes my head spin just thinking about the stuff you're supposed to do to maintain a lawn, at least according to certain yard-care experts. If you follow the recommendations of lawn-care service companies, you can spend hundreds of dollars each year on your lawn. Many people do exactly that, just because they think it's necessary for a nice lawn.

Well, guess what? It's not necessary. Okay, if you must have a picture perfect lawn that's smooth, flat and green year-round like a golf course... well, that's going to require some work. However, if you're like me and just want some nice, healthy grass, then the trick is to work... less. Yes, less!

In fact, everything you really need to know can be simplified down into three tips: 1. Mow less. 2. Lay off the chemicals and 3. Opt for low-maintenance landscaping. Need more detail? Read on!

What looks like a flat shovel but doesn't scoop? What resembles a rounded hoe? What reminds you of an ineffective ice chopper? If you said the edging tool, you'd be right!

Yes, it looks a bit odd, but the edging tool does one handy job: it makes the edges of your garden look nice and neat, it keeps the grass from encroaching into your garden, and it keeps the bark mulch from going onto your lawn.

It doesn't have to be hard work; in fact, quite the opposite. Peruse the gallery to see how simple it can be, then join me after the break for the steps involved in edging your garden using this tool.

When I was a kid, my dad would routinely get out his pruning tools and ruthlessly cut back our lovely wisteria. This would always upset me greatly because the vine was so very beautiful when it bloomed in Spring. Would it ever come back and flower again? Yes, it always did. Always.

What I understand now is that wisteria is one tough and relentless vine once established. The form of wisteria I'm talking about is Chinese wisteria (Wisteria sinesis), which actually belongs to the pea family. This big, sprawling deciduous vine has fast-growing branches that twine up and around anything it can get a hold on.

Wisteria was introduced to the US from China by gardening enthusiasts back in the early 1800s. If those folks were around today to see what they had wrought they'd probably say, "oops." That's because W. sinesis has become an invasive pest, wrapping it's vine-y arms around roadsides and woods up and down the east coast. As it spreads, wisteria chokes out native shrubs and trees with ease, and is known to climb as high as 65-feet. That's one powerful vine!

When I was a kid, I'd always wonder why the playing field near my house was periodically covered in little cat poop-sized pellets of sod. Hmm. "Who did this...and why?" I'd muse to myself. Well, I now know the grounds-keeper was aerating the turf to promote healthy grass.

For a can't-miss, straight-up explanation of lawn aeration, check out Extreme How-to's article on the subject. Yard expert, Matt, explains that the pellets are dug up using a rolling aeration device equipped with tines. As the device is towed along behind a ride-on mower, it digs into the ground and flips up small pieces of turf and soil. This lets fresh air and oxygen get at the grass roots, thus encouraging growth.

Lawn aeration devices can be rented or purchase. On a tight budget? You can try a less expensive technique like using a hand-held thatch rake or buying a pair of these funny-lookin' spiky lawn aerating shoes. Be aware, however, that seasoned lawn growers are doubtful that they really achieve much except, in the case of the spiked shoes, giving your neighbors something to laugh about behind your back.

Got a big ugly space in your yard that needs filling? Adding yet another evergreen shrub seem boring? Consider pampas grass! It's a big beauty of a plant, one that -- like all ornamental grasses -- is frequently overlooked by home landscapers.

Here are a few reasons why I love pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana):

1. It grows fairly fast, so is an ideal choice for filling in large, barren landscapes.

2. It grows nice and thick, creating an effective privacy screen, wind break or sound barrier.

3. Its long, graceful blades and delightfully fluffy pannicles (flower plumes) are beautiful.

4. Its vertical angles evoke the tropics, bringing an exotic feel to suburban yards and otherwise drab mall parking lots. Its long blades also create a dramatic and pleasing visual contrast with other garden shrubs and trees. Meanwhile, its rounded and slightly wild shape makes it an excellent softener of hard urban surfaces, like brick walls or metal signs. (See the photo above for a perfect example of this.)

Yeah, yeah. Spring is awesome. All those pretty flowers blooming. Pastel clothing. Bunnies. Blossoms. Baskets of eggs. Picnics. Outdoor weddings. Lush green lawns. Hmm. What about the down-side of Spring? Yes. There is one. Here are my personal pet peeves regarding the prettiest, perkiest season of all:

1. Return of the lawn mower. Remember how "winterize lawn mower" was on your to-do list back in September? Just never got around to it, did you? Well, guess what? It's too late and now Spring is back. Time to deal with the consequences. Your mower, having been neglected in the garage for six months with a tank full of fuel, will be hell to start again. Have fun with that.

2. Wrestling the garden hose. Spring means planting time, and planting means watering to get new plants established. Planting is satisfying work, but my most hated gardening task is watering. Actually, the water is kind of lovely. It's the hose I hate.

Standing rainwater in your yard poses a serious problem. It can lead to cracked slabs and basement damage, and it can serve as a breeding ground for mosquitoes. This situation happens when the lawn isn't graded properly; it's even worse when your neighbor sits on higher ground. But it doesn't have to be that way: installing French drains solves the problem.

French drains are in the green landscaping realm. There are two systems, one using PVC pipe and one using only gravel; I'm talking about the latter.

Establish a route from the pooling area to a lower area, preferably leading off your property. Make sure trenching won't cut any utility lines. Dig the trench six inches wide. It should be at least one foot deep where the water pools. The grade from there should increase six inches to one foot per one hundred feet of trench.

Line the trench with landscape fabric. Cover it with six inches of coarse gravel, and fold the landscape fabric over the gravel. Finally, cover with a layer of sand, then soil, and finally grass sod. Your drainage problem is solved!

The other day I saw my neighbor using an herbicide to kill the grass that was growing up through the cracks in the driveway concrete. I asked him why he was using that expensive stuff (I think it was Round-Up or something similar).

I advised him to just use vinegar instead. Sorry, I don't recall where I first learned of this tip. I was doing some research on organic lawn care several years ago and ran across it. I believe it said that it was the acidity and Ph that did the killing.

This article on using vinegar as a herbicide says it's the acetic acid that's the active ingredient. But then it goes on to explain that common household vinegar is only 5% acetic acid, and as such, poo-poo's the idea that it's very effective. But shhhhhh, don't tell my driveway; it's been working for me and saving a ton of money!