I wish I had a penny for every lawn-growing question I've answered over the years in my nursery, gardening radio phone-in program, Internet newsletter, and newspaper columns. You know, I get more questions about growing grass than just about any other kind of gardening. It seems almost everybody wants to grow a good lawn.
My own lawn started out as a hayfield and pasture and the first few years we were on the farm, it was inhabited by cows. While they were great fertilizers, my wife decided that she'd rather look at a lawn than a cow herd. So after the cows were fenced out, I started the process of creating a good lawn, using organic techniques that would meet my needs for a low maintenance lawn. I'm not a fan of heavy-duty spraying, hours of cutting grass and constant raking out in the hot sun. Let's face it, I'm a lazy gardener and I don't have a lot of time to spend taking care of grass. Any lawn that was going to live outside my front window had to be easy to care for as well as decent to look at.
It had to be a good looking lawn because I was a garden writer with a nursery. All the people coming to the nursery in the spring wanted to see good gardens and lawns. I wrote about lawns and I had better walk the walk as far as my readers and customers were concerned. This trend will even be worse now that I've written a book about lawn care; every spring-yellow dandelion will be an indictment.
This book is my way of collecting all the questions I get asked and answering them in one place. I've mined my radio and Internet question notes to find all the beginner questions I could and made sure they were answered here using easy-to-learn techniques. For example, I share all the tricks and techniques for weed control I've picked up over the years because I hate weeding and I always look for the easy way out. I can almost guarantee that if there is an easy way to have a good looking lawn, it's in this book.
I should also emphasize that I'm not a fan of chemical sprays on the lawn so this book outlines both organic as well as chemical treatments for lawn problems. Your lawn can make a contribution to our environment in a positive way and this book describes how you can accomplish this. Organic lawns are safe and healthy places for kids and pets to play. I also note that many lawns are plagued with insects and grubs. While I don't have too many problems with pests on my lawn because of the soil building techniques I use (I describe those too), I've spent some time making sure the simple and effective organic treatments for lawn pests are fully described. You'll be able to control grubs, mole and voles, and most other lawn pests once you read the book. There are summary charts throughout the book to help you find and identify the specific techniques that are useful to your garden zone.
So, if you're a beginner to lawn care or even an experienced gardener trying to improve your lawn, this book will help you grow better grass.