Ruud Kleinpaste: Lawns, lawns, lawns

Here we go – it’s spring and people wake up to some troubles with their lawns. 

Starlings dig their beaks into the soil and cause “holes” everywhere – some dunnocks (hedge sparrows) follow the starling’s idea. 

Grass grubs have always been a “problem” in NZ gardens and lawns. C-shaped grubs that live underground, feeding on roots of grasses and other plants/shrubs.  

There are a number of species in the Beetle Family Scarabeidae (scarab beetles) but the native grass grub, Costelytra zealandica, has always been in New Zealand. Its traditional habitat and host plants were native grasses, such as tussocks, and they occur at quite high altitudes.  

There is no doubt that these beetles considered the new high-nutrient imported grasses as ice-cream, especially when we started planting whole paddocks full of that stuff! 

With all those birds, your lawn becomes a lot more biodiverse – personally, I love that! 

Mosses grow as the pH lowers; they are miniature forests in which an enormous range of caterpillars, millipedes, beetles, and flies as well as mites and predators, parasites, and other beneficial critters do their brilliant jobs. Moss in lawns is not really a “problem”. 

For those people that want to “restore” their lawn, the best time to “sow” a new lawn (after totally spraying the old grasses and weeds, leaving nothing but a bare soil) is autumn. Of course, you can also get yourself a series of rolled-up turf mats (ready-lawn) or, as I noticed some school principals prefer, create an “all weather” playing field from artificial grass – spare me! 

You’ve got it, I really am not impressed with perfect lawns – few ecosystem services, very low biodiversity and far too “sustainable” (to use a much over-used marketing term). 

A lawn can have flowers and lots of perennials, a place where you can walk from one end of the garden to the other, a pathway, mowed to low growing and easy to maintain – the kids can play there and birds graze the grubs from under the roots.  

It certainly should not be a monoculture of grass plants trimmed to an inch of their life and meticulously cut along the edges. 

Imagine a lawn with heaps of flowers, and all you have to do is mow a meandering track through it all. 

Other troubles: homeowners let their dogs use the backyard as their own personal toilet. Often after a winter of such potty practice, when the snow melts, you’ll often find your lawn speckled with unsightly yellow patches.  

What causes these patches? Dog urine contains a variety of nitrogen compounds. Too much nitrogen will burn the grass and create yellow patches. But appropriate concentrations of nitrogen can actually be beneficial to the lawn, which is why you’ll often see rings of thick dark green grass around the yellow patches. This makes sense since the main ingredient in lawn fertilizer is nitrogen.  

The concentration of nitrogen in the dog’s urine depends on the type of dog, its sex, and what the animal eats. Larger dogs will pee more and cause more damage. Female dogs also tend to cause more damage than males because they squat and urinate in one concentrated patch whereas the males spray their urine over a larger area. Diets high in protein can increase the concentration of nitrogen in the urine since protein breaks down to release nitrogen compounds. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
That'd be rude climb past is our man in the garden?
Hey rude, Hey Jack?

Speaker 3 (00:18):
Ha ha, how are you? You're going very well? Ha?

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah, I'm very well.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
I'm impressed to your talking lawns this morning, because we
have had a few messages people saying, can you get
rude to talk about the lawn But I know that
deep down philosophically, you're going to say something like lawns
should never exist because they don't exist in nature.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
That's about right. You've heard that before. I'm sure you.
I love it because yeah, yeah, okay, that's that's true.
The crazy thing though, is you know that and this
is true actually within the if you like the pastoral area,
the grass grubs have always been an enormous problems in
peddics and these are these are beetles that literally can

(00:58):
do a lot of damage to the grass, you know,
in for sheep and cattle and all that sort of stuff.
But what very few people realizes that the grass crub
is actually a New Zealand native beetlespeed in fact, endemic
to New Zealand. It is our our thing.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Okay, yeah, I know that, So that's number one.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
So if you get grass grub in your garden, you'll
find them when you when you do a little bit
of digging in those places which which get yellow and
die up, and you see these C shaped grubs. And
I checked them on the website for you or the
other liby did. I just put them in there and
that is what they look like.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
But here comes to thing. When we started introducing all
these amazing, wonderful, beautiful important grasses with high nutrients that
tastes to the grass grub as I like ice cream.
That is such good grass that I'm going down the
hill down below and take the mickey out of the garden.

(02:04):
And the people that grow all the sheep and things
like that and do the damage there. It's unbelievable, and
people have no idea that they are actually native. So
there you are. Typically. Yeah, so some of these things
will will So there's there's actually lots of things without
say urban grass grasses. If you like, do you get

(02:26):
mosses growing in your grasses? And that is to do
with the pH. You know, if the pH is too
low or too high, you get mosses. It's as simple
as that. And the way to actually control those out
of your lawn is going to either raise their pH
or lower their pH after you've done a test on
how how acid they are or how non acid they are.

(02:50):
Basically that's how that works. Oh my goodness. Now, people
that have got troubles with their lawns, I always say,
you have to restore them. If you really want a
nice grass lawn, you've got to restore them. But you
do that in autumn. So that's not the time of
the year to do it.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
Now.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
I would wait for six months if you like. You
can also use a ready lawn, which is right ding
ding ding, off you go. And the other one, of
course is and this is what they quite often do
at schools. You get these artificial grass. Yeah, I think,
I mean really.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
I was going to say, how does that go down
on the clodbust household?

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Like a ton of nothing? There you go, so there
you go. So that honestly, that's so here's the problem.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
So we have a wee lawn. It's not not messive
or anything. And we have lots of the important important
pissed spaces. So we have a lot of pastelam and
a lot of cou you cock you yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
And yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
The problem is that and I think they're quite good
when there's low moisture, like they seem to do very
well when the rest of the lawn is not doing
so well. And I'm not someone who you know, spends
hours looking after the lawn or anything. But the reason
I don't like those in particular is that if I'm
just playing a bit of like backyard cricket or something
with the eight year old, often the ball will hit

(04:15):
it and go off on a weird angle and stuff
like it actually disrupts the kind of the reason we
have the lawn. But I mean, that's a bit of
an effort, right to get that stuff out of there.
You're just you're almost better just to start.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
Again, exactly. But cocuus is a really really what do
you call it, aggressive weed if you like, and it
goes into your borders, It goes all to the side.
And I remember that when I lived in Lango and
the Titung in places like that, we had it all
over the place and I just had to spade it
into into straight lines again to make sure it doesn't

(04:48):
go to the to the nice borders, because then I'll
hear from Julie of course, and then I can't sleep,
and you know how it works. Yeah, yeah, so that's
exactly that's exactly how that is. But on the other hand,
you can get rid of it and start again hoping
that you haven't left any cocuu in there around there.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Gold.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
I just feel like I feel like, at the moment
I get rid of it, first of all, it's going
to take me a.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Year to get rid of it.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
Like I'll be out there every you know, every Saturday afternoon,
listen to weekend sport, on my hands and knees, digging away,
and then you just know that by nick Saturday, it's
all going to be back, you know.

Speaker 3 (05:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
But the way I have a lawn is easy. You
have a lawn with an enormous amount, let everything grow,
wonderful plants, flowers, everything, and then all you do with
your lawn mower is you make these lovely, meandering little
bits and pieces through there. That's going to be your
path and the rest will be all your flowers. You
add to the biodiversity. Everybody lives there, everybody happy. That

(05:44):
is what the lawn should be about.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
Nice, Okay, I thank you so much. Yeah, we'll put
all your advice and the photo of that grub up
on the news talks he'd with so we can have
a look. Thank you so much for catching in next week.
Rude climb passed in the garden for us This Morning.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to news Talks he'd be from nine am Saturday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.