Question
Hello my friend LIG, remember me? you told me to make Chickweed pesto out of my annoying lawn weeds, and I did feed a little chickweed to the kids. Well, you helped me when I first started to go organic, and now I am gangbusters and quite snooty and superior about it. My front lawn looks pretty good, I have some crabgrass returning but much less thanks to the CMG, although I have a question: The stuff I bought was pettety, like  koi fish food. It was not claiming on the bag to be weed control. Is this working or should I be sure to buy the powdery kind? Not sure of its effectiveness,as I did use the bad stuff early on before I converted. Two things: one: should I put down compost now as a fertilizer or use the corn gluten fertilizer and do the compost in the fall when I am ready to put down seed in a few bald patches?  TWO:I want to kill weeds including crabgrass in the area of the swingset, so I am happy to make the soil unfriendly to plants since I want to put down new woodchips. I read about using vinegar mixed with salt and a touch of dish soap. What do you think?  C

Answer
Nice to hear from you again, Catherine.  Cornmeal Gluten is a 'pre-emergent weedkiller', which means that if Weed Seeds are germinating, CMG will stop them.  If you use it now, it won't hurt.  But this is not Weed Seed germination time.  Baby Weeds start to grow in the spring and the fall.  Anything you use now may still be working in a few months, but you will get a bigger bang for your buck if you wait another month or so when the seeds of Weeds you had last spring, as well as any that were dormant and have been triggered to grow, begin to germinate.

Got that?

It's a lot of information.  You can't expect to learn it overnight.

The CMG that looks like Koi Food is pelletized and it is very good for your Grass and very bad for the Weeds.  There are advantages to pellets that you don't get with powder.  That goes for a lot of Lawn products, including Pelletized Lime and Pelletized Gypsum.

Your Lawn is not growing fast and furious right now, but Compost you apply will keep the microbes happy, and they will product just the right amount of NPK for your Grass roots to use.

Just remember to Mow like the dickens, especially if you have any Weeds now.  DO NOT let those Weeds make seeds.  Any Dandelions, just dig and rip them out.

As far as your choices near a Swingset, Salt is quite permanent.  Vinegar is quite temporary.  Best choice there is a few layers of thick black plastic covered with several inches of wood chips.  My bluestone driveway is just now wearing away, and the base was black plastic.  Nothing will grow underneath for 10 or 15 years, and the wood chips will cushion falling bodies.  That's my opinion.

Thanks for the update.  How was the pesto?