Smart As a Dandelion

Monsanto patent #8,765,432?

You can use grass growth reducers and also artificial grass or let your wife mow the grass?

The best growth reducer for lawns is beer dregs - it makes the grass come up half cut!

So you're saying, you're NOT married?

We don't need another company screwing with the plant DNA. Monsanto has already screwed enough of them up.

Go green buy a goat. It will keep it trimmed for you. A goat can also help with the recyclables and reduce your kitchen waste. Just dump the kitchen waste in the yard. Go back in a hour or so and pick up the recyclable items. No need to wash those cans out he would have licked them clean. Also is a great fall treat barbeque goat.

We had a goat when I was young, it was useless for controlling the lawn. Contrary to popular belief goats are picky about what they eat. Grass, flowers, vegetables, herbaceous borders yes - clumps of weed in the lawn - no. You end up with everything levelled except for large clumps of obnoxious weeds which they won't touch.

Sheep seem to be better at creating a level sward (although I have never actually kept them).

Goats are also escapologists, they like to climb and can reach about 6 feet beyond the end of their chain so they can be difficult to keep.

Just keep the goat away from your Ferrari- I had one (the goat- not Ferrari) and he loved to spend most of his time on the car roof- otherwise great idea but sheep are less athletic.

If you want to have happy goats, give them something that will make noise when they walk on it.nothing they love better than walking on piece of tin, or a truck or car hood or top, except of course,escaping the pen.There is usually one Houdini in the bunch that teaches the others how to escape,and you will never keep him in.The only animal more stubborn than a cat or mule,but more intelligent than both.(sorry, Del). They will even show cows how to escape,just for fun and excitement, watching you try to round them all up.

The best way to handle a Houdini goat is to make him the guest of honor at a BBQ.Put him on the rotisserie and slather on plenty of sauce.

It is best to geld the goat about 2 months before cooking it, to reduce the strong taste.Then you have the satisfaction of watching him wonder what happened back there while you wait for his odor to subside.((Believe me,If you have ever had an escape artist goat, you will delight in his demise.)

A goat will put his nose 1 inch from the electric wire, sniffing for ozone,and if it is off, he will know,and out he will go,taking everyone with him, off to feast in the soybean field.

I saw a Houdini goat of mine use his horns to hold up the wire for others to go under!

Remember:The only way to beat a goat is to eat a goat.

Sheep are much easier to contain, once bitten, they stay away from the wire.You can take the wire down and they will not cross the line where it used to be for a long time.You will have to drive over or walk over the line several times to make them go into another pasture.

A final note:There is more than 1 way to skin a goat, and they are all good,'cause that is one less goat to worry with.

BURP! (It is even hard to keep a bad goat down.)

Another thing that can reduce the burden of keeping goats, is knowing how to mitigate the smell of mature billy goats.

Male goats begin to stink upon reaching puberty.

You can tell when this is starting, as the goat will begin to grow a beard.

The stink of a billy goat is concentrated in his beard.

Carefully trimming or shaving a billy goat regularly to maintain the beard under about and inch will significantly reduce the stink coming from mature billy goats.

Do you know why the smell is in the beard?Because the odor is in the urine, and a Billy goat will deliberately urinate onto his beard.He thinks it smells good.To him , it is cologne.The stronger it smells, the better he likes it.So,yes,trimming the beard would help, but the source of the odor is his 'Nads, and the resultant testosterone in his system.

The best way to stop a billy goat from stinking is to "band" the nad sack before maturity,and the odor never is a problem.This consists of placing a small tight fitting "o ring" around the sack and in a few weeks it will fall off painlessly.Once a billy goat is mature, the process is different,requiring surgery or "Clamping". See your local vet for either of these methods if you have never done it or seen it done,or do not have the proper tools to do it yourself.Single Edge Razor Blades and screw worm medicine used to be the only tools required, but it is a gentler kinder world now, and virtually painless to the animal.

Excerpted from: "Goats 101 for dummies".

One word......

Dandelion Wine

Ok its two words.

Embrace the dandelion..

Hear, hear Bricktop.

With the poor soil quality and heavy shade in and around my yard, I'm happy if anything of a generally green color grows there. Dandelions and all. Vetch, crabgrass, you name it, I'm probably growing it. I mow it. That's it.

Every year, I throw down and mix in more compost from my piles in the back yard and overseed with allegedly shade tolerant locally produced (farm co-op) grass seed. It seems to help a little while then just disappears down into this sandy, dusty abyss of the worst soil this side of Afghanistan. What's worst about this crappy soil is, that if a bare spot gets a good soaking, once it dries, it's about as hard as concrete.

I am loathe to cut down any of my trees because the shade they provide in the stinkin' hot summer. So I put up with clogging gutters, fall leaf raking and all, and the shade that keeps the grass from growing well.

I refuse to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars hiring a lawn company to continually throw down herbicides, pesticides, fertilizer and seed. Even though I live on a street named after a famous golf course, I don't need a lawn that Tiger Woods would be proud to play on.

Here is a picture of where I live. Many of my neighbors have cleared away trees. I just can't bring myself to do it.

Sir Robin,

I heartily concur. Luckily for me most of my neighbors do as well. We're near Charlotte, NC on what used to be a goldmine and some of our yards are tailings that won't even grow weeds.

My father's step dad used to say if it's green and all the same height that makes it a lawn!

My wife's grandmother came from the generation that used to sweep the dirt to keep grass from growing in the yard!

I personally hate lawns.When I grew up in the deep south, the yards were swept clean with a reed broom.Grass was not allowed to grow in the yards.Everyone had nut trees in their yard, and it was much easier to collect them with no grass or leaves on the ground. Then some yankees must have come south and changed the cultural philosophy,'cause now everyone has a lawn,and a mower, and a weed eater.I do not fertilize,water,nor weed my yard.Whatever grows is what grows.It still looks green. It is mowed,but only when I cannot find my pickup or tractor.Then it is baled for hay for the cows or goats.Several of my properties are maintained by goats and sheep, and mowing is never required.Not BAAAAAA_D!

However, the states spend millions of dollars planting and mowing grass on the roadside and medians to prevent erosion.That is where "Smart Grass" could save a lot of resources.

Nice to know I'm not alone.

Not a fan of laws either, but dandelions are easily controlled with a broad leaf herbicide. I hate crabgrass and some of the other grassy type weeds that aren't so easily wiped out.

Most of my yard is sectioned off into islands of shrubs (including low-maintenance, easily-grown blueberries), trees, pampas grass, and perrenial flowers (bulbs) to make it as low maintenance as possible and to minimize the amount of mowing I do. My lawn is fescue so it's green year round and grows slowest when the weather is hot and dry. It'll even go dormant and not require any work when the weather is really hot. It takes some work to establish a lawn, but once established a good lawn keeps weeds away and requires very little maintenance.

It is interesting to me what the word 'weed' means to different people.... especially in the context of an area managed that yields no produce....such as a lawn.

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Does 'weed' mean specifically an aggressive invasive exotic species?

or

Does 'weed' mean any plant that has volunteered (that wasn't accepted when discovered) regardless of whether or not it is native or exotic, aggressive or meek?

or

....?

Yeah, different people have different interpretations. The weeds that annoy me are not exotic, just invasive and hard to control like nutsedge; weeds that are even less useful to the environment than grass and look ugly too.

'...nutsedge; weeds that are even less useful to the environment than grass and look ugly too....'

I think 'nutsedge' probably looks ugly to you because it is so intrusive and hearty. There isn't anything inherently aesthetically displeasing about the form.

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As far as useless.....I think grass is more useless.

Sedgenut is sometimes grown as a food crop and is one of the oldest cultivated crops.

Sedgenut is great for erosion control.

Sedgenut can even be used effectively as bait for invasive carp.

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The fact that it grows so well in your location, might be seen as a sign that it is something that..... will grow well there.

To each his own.

I'm sure if I tried to grow it as a crop, it would grow poorly and I'd be battling the fescue weeds growing around it.

A weed is any plant that grows where it is not wanted.Nutgrass in your garden is a weed.Nutgrass as a crop is not a weed.some flowers have a tendency to be "weedy", that is, they spread into unwanted areas.I have dewberries invading my blueberries.The ones in the blueberries are weeds.The dewberries on the line, where I want them, are not weeds.

As in real estate, it is always Location,Location,Location.

A Rose weed by any other name is still a rose Weed

On a personal note, I kept goats for many years and had no issues with them not eating all of the weeds in any area I fenced. They are rather excellent escape artists, and in fact the last one around is roaming wild with the deer in the area, having gone feral on me. My Dad ( now 95, 8th grade education and one of the smartest people I have ever known ) always said he wanted to invent perforated grass that would fall over at the correct height. I am on the high tech side and want to put lasers around my house that would cook the grass at the right level once a week.......I don't suppose the cats would like that much, turn them into lowrider kitties!! Sorry Del, I will put an alarm on first to warn them.

Get some geese. There was a lady in my home town that had 6 geese. She never had to mow the lawn, the geese kept it at about 1/2 inch. They fertilised it too (and the sidewalk).

....do Geese see God....

?

_{(Its the same whichever way you approach this statement)}

We panic in a pew

This jogged my mind.

I couldn't resist looking into something I've heard at odd times in my life -- the idea that weeds can be an indicator of soil status. One representative article of such a viewpoint is here (http://nwfarmsandfood.com/index.php/what-weeds-can-tell-about-the-soil) (sorry, link no longer available). I then asked the obvious question -- "Says who?"

I was not finding any cited research about the subject and was about to give up, when I came across this link to an article by Meleah Maynard (http://everydaygardener.com/reading-your-weeds-what-do-weeds-really-tell-us-about-soil-conditions/) (sorry, link no longer available), a lady who obviously had and took more time to investigate "Who?" The upshot of her article is that you can't rule out the possibility; more of a "trust but verify" outlook. The scientists contacted by her didn't disagree with the notion. In fact, they made statements that could be considered CYA. (Such as, "But it's not bogus that certain plants really do well in a given environment and their presence tells us something." Something? The only way to know if the folk wisdom being handed down has any merit is for someone to do some research. Funding is likely a problem. Given modern agricultural science, it's probably a case of "Who cares?")

So, I wonder if the information is astute observation of generations of gardeners, and accurate, containing some truth, or just "folk" wisdom that may be hit or miss? Maybe some hints lie buried in books about soil science waiting for someone to glean through and uncover. In any case, there appears to be little in the way of research that can be found via web searches to substantiate the stated "knowledge."

There are certainly symbiotic relationships in Nature. This bit of folk wisdom is suggesting that weeds may be part of such a system whereby "corrections" to soil has developed. But just that thought implies an almost ubiquitous, latent population of weeds in waiting until soil conditions favor their germination and development. That would be quite a reach. Are there other mechanisms to explain such a theoretical system?

In looking for info. on symbiotic relationships in Nature I came across this interesting article/interview with Tony Wright, whom I had not heard of before (what a surprise with close to 9 billion on the planet, eh?) It's tangential to the subject of dandelions, but I can't help finding some hypotheses interesting. Unproven, but nonetheless interesting.

The subject of the history of botany is interesting in and of itself, since our lives depend on plants. Plenty of never-ending links to links to more links (as is the case on the web) in this Wiki article on the history of botany.

I am interested enough to pursue this. So, if you also find this interesting, stay tuned... I've requested 2 books via inter-library loan about weeds, mentioned as references in various web pages. ("Weeds and Why They Grow," and "Weeds and What They Tell Us.") We'll see. If anything interesting comes of it worth posting I may add it to this thread, or if interesting enough, possibly start a new one.

In the US the tradition was that the government would support the price of wheat at the level it was in 1910, adjusted for inflation. Today, there are many more grass growers (suburbanites) than wheat growers, and I think we should use our political clout to get the government to pay us the 1910 price, as horse fodder, adjusted for inflation. Of course,there may be a surplus. The government is used to handling surpluses (reference millions of tons of stored cheese). If we get paid for letting the civil servants pick up our grass clippings, then we don't need "smart" grass.

'...there are many more grass growers (suburbanites) than wheat growers...'

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There may not have been a time when this wasn't the case. Since wheat is a type of grass, all it takes is one person growing some non-wheat strain of grass, for there to be more total grass grower than just wheat growers.

I'd like to know who gets to decide that pretty yellow flowers in the yard are evil?

The only thing I've done is ordered $30 worth of Zoysia plugs from the back of a magazine, that are spreading out nicely. No watering, no fertilizing, and rare mowing; otherwise it's native grasses, dandylions, clover and anything else that's green.

All the better if it happens to flower. Don't forget the bees!

The dandelion could be a weed to some, but it is tasty to others, bottle summer sunshine (wine), dandelion greens in your salad, or the way my mom used to cook them with bacon and onions (hmmmm). They also break up the monotonous green with dabs of sunny yellow:)

I happen to like the yards in the south with the big shade trees and the pine straw lined yards with pockets of flowers here and there. Or the yards full of cactus and native plants in the west that do not use up the precious water for a green carpet of grass.