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BPGreen, please elaborate on organic practices
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Posted by
betsyhac Wisconsin (
My Page) on
Sun, Jul 24, 11 at 12:58
Posted by bpgreen 5UT (My Page) on Mon, Apr 12, 10 at 1:31
I've got a fairly large female dog (lab/border collie mix) and a fairly small lawn (4k sq ft, but the dog is mostly in the back, which is probably less than half) and I don't get the dead spots. The only thing I can think of is that since I've gone to mostly organic practices, there are enough soil microbes to take care of the N in the urine. Even the areas that are all native grass (which have very reduced N requirements and tolerance) don't seem to develop the "P" circles. |
Follow-Up Postings:
RE: BPGreen, please elaborate on organic practices
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| I just mean that I started using organic fertilizers. The main one I used was coffee grounds from Starbucks, but that's really only an option for people with fairly small lawns (I've got about 4000 sq ft). I still spot spray weeds sometimes, but other than that I don't use much on the lawn. I think that what happened is that my soil got enough microbe growth that the dog's urine can be processed without damaging the lawn. I don't know that for sure, but that's what I suspect. |
RE: BPGreen, please elaborate on organic practices
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| Microbe growth due to the coffee grounds? I have a pretty small lawn too. Would it be better to be proactive with the grounds and put them on the green grass, or mix in with the seed and water when I'm repairing the brown spots, or both? |
RE: BPGreen, please elaborate on organic practices
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| I never tried spreading it in a spreader. I always just tossed t around the lawn. Just to clarify, I used coffee grounds, but you can use any ground or cracked grain and some will spread more easily though a fertilizer spreader. |
RE: BPGreen, please elaborate on organic practices
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| Did you dry the grounds before spreading them around the lawn or were they still moist? |
RE: BPGreen, please elaborate on organic practices
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| I didn't dry them. If they were in the silver bag, I just shook it and moved it back and forth as I walked backward around hte lawn. If they were in a bigger bag, I transferred to a bucket and used a scoop to get them out. |
RE: BPGreen, please elaborate on organic practices
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| The problem with dog urine is the lawn does not have enough microbes so the urine kills the grass. bpgreen used an organic fertilizer, coffee grounds, to keep his microbe population high and happy. Sometimes you see it as UCG (used coffee grounds). It really does work. If you want to read more about it go to the Gardenweb Organic Gardening Forum. Look for the FAQs. The last on on the list is the Organic Lawn Care FAQ. It explains about the microbes and how to feed them. Coffee grounds have protein in them that the microbes can use. Every ground up nut, bean, and seed has protein and makes an organic fertilizer. Some are much better than others because they have more protein. Coffee and corn are at the low end of the protein list. Soybean meal and alfalfa pellets (Purina Rabbit Chow) are much higher on the list. You can get these at the feed store. But anyway, when the lawn is fertilized, it should have plenty of the microbes needed to process the dog urine when it gets deposited. The coffee you get at Starbucks comes in silver bags. They dump the wet grounds into the bags and that's what you get. One bag I got was pure sog. The next one was fairly dry. You never know, but in any case it is always too moist to drop nicely through a spreader. You can try to dry them out if you want. Try spreading them out on cardboard in the direct sun for a few hours. I either use mine as fertilizer for plants or in the compost. Flinging them into the grass by hand can be messy. They actually dry fairly well in the compost, but we're in a pretty severe drought. My compost is bone dry. |
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