Killing off Weeds, Hydrangea Blooms, & Mushrooms, Oh My

First of all, this one comes from Mary. This is pretty interesting. Mary says she’s decided to start taking care of her neglected backyard. ‘Do I kill off the weeds first and then fertilize to help the grass grow or fertilize first and then kill the weeds?’

So if the grass is taller, which this time of year, you want to be cutting up at four and a half inches or four and a half, somewhere in that range. The more leaf surface you have to put the herbicide on that kills the weeds, the faster and better it’s going to work. So I would definitely go ahead and go after killing at least one round of weed killer down before you start to do any type of reseeding or adding more grass.

And doing that this time of year is going to require a commitment to watering to make sure that new seed develops properly. Because remember when it first germinates, it’s sitting at the surface, its roots only a 16th of an inch long. So if the top 16th inch of the soil dries out, you’ll lose the grass.

So it’s something where like morning and evening is something you’re going to have to, you know, get out there, run a sprinkler. And I would recommend either using a straw or a product like Sweet Peat. We actually have a new straw that we got in. It’s got a tackifier in it, which actually makes it stick together once you put it down and water it in and it stays put in the yard.

So she also says, ‘my endless summer hydrangea is huge, but no blooms. Did I do something wrong?’

No. So with endless summer hydrangeas that can happen, especially if it’s an older hydrangea, sometimes it uses up the nutrients in the soil. I recommend a really strong dose of all season fertilizer. Normally we recommend three scoops. You may go up as much as five scoops on that plant and then water it more than you think it needs. The high excess water is one of the things that causes it to set blooms.

Even though we’ve had all this rain, remember when the rain comes, it goes away really quickly. Because it runs off, it doesn’t have a chance to truly soak in. So if you put a hose at the base of that hydrangea, if it’s a large one, you may have to move the hose to two or three different spots and let that hose trickle out for 10 or 15 minutes at each place and do that a couple times a week. You’ll get that soil really saturated and between that and the fertilizer, it’ll cause it to set those blooms and then start blooming like crazy throughout the rest of summer.

And her final question is, ‘what are all the tiny mushrooms all over the yard?’

That’s from those crazy rains we’ve been having. That is an environmental thing. Generally after a mow or two, once we dry out, that’s naturally going to probably go away, but we do have stuff in the store you can put down that’ll make it happen faster. But generally that’s something that will go away once the environment’s not super wet all the time.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).