Featured Articles

Water gardens provide a breathtaking and practical solution toward energizing and beautifying any landscape, large or small. Although the initial filling of a backyard pond requires a fair amount of water, over time the same expanse of lawn actually takes more water to maintain. As a contractor looking to expand services and options for customers, water gardening is a great addition to your résumé and helps set you apart from your competition....

Hunting season is almost upon us. Every year, we clean and tune up our gear knowing that on an old irrigation site there’s a 50/50 chance things could go our way. Whether we like it our not, there’s a decent chance for some kind of an irrigation system failure, and often the bigger challenge is finding – not fixing – the problem....

The increasing popularity of compact excavators in recent years has brought with it a vast selection of models. Today, equipment manufacturers make enough different models that landscape contractors can choose one tailored to any need. So with all of these choices, how do you find the machine that’s right for you?...

For most of my life I’ve been a “weatherhead.” I’ve been staring reverently at the sky since I started mowing my parents’ lawn at the self-involved age of eight. I couldn’t wait to push that growling Craftsman Eager through the thick stuff, soaking up the sounds and smells associated with fresh-cut grass, and we had a perfect canvas a 3,000-square-foot rectangle of flat, verdant, organic carpet. Every Saturday morning, I looked into the stratosphere and wondered if I was going to get rained out or baked in the afternoon sun....

Is your customer’s thatch a nuisance or a serious problem? Understanding how thatch collects and affects lawn growth will go a long way in determining the severity of this common problem. Thatch is a communion of dead grass, roots and other matter that builds up in grass over time. It collects on most lawns above the soil at surface level and becomes intertwined in grass stems. When the decomposition cycle is delayed for any variety of reasons, dead matter begins to build up. As the build-up increases, the matter becomes stacked, and then packs down or mats, causing healthy grass blades to become stressed, weaker and thinner. Thatch can actually choke a lawn to death....

Initial symptoms of fairy ring are characterized by small rings of lush, exceedingly green grass in turf. As the fungi rings grow, three kinds of fairy ring may form: Type one has a ring of stimulated grass growth surrounded by a ring of mushrooms. Type two has only a ring of mushrooms enclosing seemingly normal grass growth. The third has only a ring of stimulated grass growth. Occasionally, a patch of declining grass growth, or even dead grass, may appear within the ring of stimulated grass....

“Rain, rain, go away. Come again some other day.” The problem of getting too little or too much rain is hardly new. The nursery rhyme that begins with those words originated in the days of Queen Elizabeth I, during the late 1500s. If only we could cause rain to fall in amounts and durations that suit our individual purposes, there probably would be no floods, no droughts, no ruined concerts, ball games or picnics. Nearly 500 years later and with all our technological advances, we still cannot control precipitation. What we can do is manage precipitation when it gets to earth....

It won’t be long now until we start to see water in the news again. It’s become a perennial favorite of the news media. I suppose that’s good in that it brings awareness to how important the landscape and irrigation industries are to our communities’ hydrologic health. I further suppose it brings awareness to how important the landscape and irrigation industries are when neglecting our communities’ hydrologic health....

Turfgrass entomologists often state that the bluegrass billbug is one of the most commonly misdiagnosed insect pests of cool-season turf, but managers of bermudagrass and zoysiagrass have their own species to contend with -- the hunting billbug.  ...