Best Yard
On The Block
Four Cool-Season Lawn Care Plans,
Starting at Just Three Steps a Year
Everyone will tell you to buy more, spray more, and do more. This book argues the opposite. Three steps a year, about seven hours total, and the most effective thing in it is free.
Paperback $19.99 · Kindle $12.99
Paperback $19.99 · Kindle $12.99
About the book
"This is real?"
People stop on the sidewalk and bend down to touch my lawn, because they think it might be fake. It is not, and what it took to get there is a lot less than you would guess.
Almost every lawn guide is written by somebody who sells lawn products. The advice and the money point the same way: put more down. More applications, more bags, more spend, every year, forever.
This book argues the opposite. Put less on your lawn.
Over two decades and three states, I have dropped weed and feed, pre-emergent, overseeding, two soil amendments, and my general sprayer. The lawn got better every time I removed something. That is not a philosophy, it is what happened, and this book shows you the order it happened in.
Four programs. Pick one and stop reading the rest.
Good. Three steps a year, about seven hours total. For the person who wants a noticeably better lawn and has a life.
Better. Five steps.
Best. Eight steps.
Elite. For when you have fallen in love with it and want to know how far this goes.
Most lawn books hand you the hardest version and let you decide you cannot do it. I did that to a neighbor once. He looked at what I gave him, told me it was too much, and did nothing at all for an entire season. He was right, and this book exists because of it.
What you get
The four habits that do most of the work, on one page, up front
Why chasing weeds is backwards, and what to chase instead
Season timing by soil temperature instead of month names, so the program works whether your spring starts in March or in May
Mowing height, watering depth, feeding intervals, and aeration, with the reasoning behind each
Diagnosis for when it goes wrong: fungus, grubs, clump fescue, dog spots, and the problems that are not worth treating
A product and rate sheet, an annual calendar, and blank application logs in the appendix
This book is for cool-season lawns. Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, tall fescue, fine fescue, or any blend of them, which covers most of the northern half of the country. If your lawn is green in April and struggling in August, that is you. Chapter 1 confirms it in about a minute.
About the author
Lawn care has never been my job
It is what I do when I am not working, and I have been doing it seriously for close to twenty years, in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa.
Seriously enough to keep soil test records year over year, run test plots in my own yard to find out which advice was real, and quietly stop buying products the data said were doing nothing. A lawn company owner who had been mowing for twenty years once called me to say it was the thickest lawn he had ever cut.
I take this far more seriously than I should. That is the only reason there are twenty years of records behind this book.
