Question
QUESTION: Not sure what a homework question is or if you meaning I'm a student or something.  However I'm a 33 year old adult living in Red Deer Alberta.  I have just moved here and my lawn has a few small patches of very dark green and extremely fast growing grass areas, though it looks like perfectly normal grass. IE not crab grass. The rest of my lawn looks great, but these odd patches make it very unattractive. Any suggestions?


ANSWER: Hi Jason,

You'll have to excuse me, but I'm a bit new to this site and when I clicked "This is a Homework Question", I didn't realize it would decline the question and send you that message.  I thought it would give me the opportunity to write you with a few more questions. (ie: me doing the homework)

1st, do you by chance have a small dog?  Often, this is what we see where the dog urinates.  Some dogs kill the grass with toxic doses of urine.  For smaller dogs, the doses are actually akin to heavy fertilization.  This makes for round, dark green, fast growing patches.

If that is the case, a fertilization should even things out better.  If not, please let me know so we can go to step 2.

-C.J. Brown
www.TheLawnCoach.com

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi CJ, thanks for the quick response.  No, it's not from a dog, as I don't have one and the previous owners were allergic.  However the comment about over fertilization sounds like a possibility.  However, how do I then "over" fertilize the rest of my lawn so it blends in?  As the patches take up maybe 5% of the yard, I was hoping to do something about that part, instead of making the other 95% blend in?

Answer
If it is in fact a problem with localized fertilization, then there's not much to do.  Fertilizing the whole lawn would mask those spots, but you wouldn't be able to discourage the grass in those spots from doing well.

Other than that, I'm not quite sure what this could be.  I'm going on the assumption that your analysis is correct and that it appears as though this is the same type of grass, just growing thicker and more prolifically in patches.

If you can send me a few close up pictures, and a few further away, I could probably get a much better idea of what we're talking about here.  You can email them to me at [email protected].  Once I get them, I'll let you know if I have a better idea.

Thanks again for writing.

-C.J. Brown
www.TheLawnCoach.com