Eradicating Nut Grass

So at the front of our house, we required a retaining wall installed. Since we needed a significant amount of fill to level the soil, I choose to purchase the cheapest fill possible. For around $45/cum I didn't really want to spend much more than this as I was looking at 20cum in total. Now the person on the other end of the line, did warn me that the fill may contain nut-grass. I didn't heed their warning.

It was close to 2 years and through extreme rain and dry spells, the lawn took a bit of a hammering in terms of watering. So during a record dry spell, the lawn dried up abit. We are lazy, we don't actively go out and water the lawn at all. So the lawn dried up abit and thinned out in several areas. I allowed the weeds from beneath to penetrate layer of lawn we had their. This is my theory anyway (as we never saw a sign of nut grass before the whole incident). So over a period of 6months, we became infested with nut grass. It made the lawn look dirty. Especially when I mowed all that could be seen in patches were the stalks of the nut grass. It was terribly ugly too look at.

I took to google to eradicate the problem. What did I find? Several products targeting nutgrass only. I was told Sempra was good, and was available in the local hardware store. It was not, but a similar product called Sedgehammer was available. I have to admit, it was not cheap. The product is small 25g bottle (but very potent) $70. I bought a decent weed applicator spray also, putting me back $100 all up.

So after getting home and reading the instructions. There was something missing. It told me I needed some non-ionic surfactant. I went back to the store and asked if they had any, no one had any idea. Everyone in the store tried googling the product on their iphones and finally came to the conclusion that, all I need to do was to add some specific kind of detergent. I looked around the house, all I could find was anionic surfactant detergent. Not wanting take the risk, I popped down the shops to buy specifically the one required. What do you know, I could not find it. But I found one that had 10% non-ionic agent and 25% anionic surfactant content. So I thought at least it had some, surely this will work to some extent. Since I was reading that some just used plain ol' anionic.

So it was the afternoon by this time, I was ready to torch these weeds. I filled my tank in the correct proportions and sprayed the hell out of those weeds. Not thinking I had targeted them all I reapplied in the stubborn areas.

 

So I took a photo after the application to compare before and after photos. The instructions told me not to mow for a period of 5 days. So I waited a week before I would mow the lawn. Here are some photos after the mow.



Now after a month, we can see that the lawn is recovering to it's former glory. The NutGrass is dying. YEAH!

Here are some photos after 5 weeks of application. Lucky for us, we also had some decent rain over this time. So the lawn has had time to grow, but definitely not the NUTGRASS at this stage. I have been warned, that it may regrow further down the line. Which I am ready for. So after spending what I thought was an expensive weed-killer, I think it was money worth spent.

The bottle comes with a 2.5g spoon (10Lt portion). I only applied one spoon over the 100sqm of lawn that was affect by the lawn. I would have close to 22.5g left. I will hold onto it until I know for sure that no more nutgrass will come back. If anyone has a problem with this stubborn weed, I highly recommend, this product.

6 MONTH

Well, today we had the maintenance guys turn up 10mins ahead of schedule, which was good, as I had to go to work as soon as we were finished.

We went through our list of warantee issues, then his tradesman guy turned up and started to working on the things he could. Some items had to be fixed by a plumber, capenter, electrician, window supplier, and garage installer. So I think the tradesman attended to about half of the minor problems. So we'll be waiting for the others to be fixed as soon as they can organise those contractors to do so. We have minor issues with appliances, and we were told to ring the appliance manufacturers to fix their waranty issues.

Can't say their were any major things that needed fixing up. The common things are fixing paint work in the cornices as the foundation settles and the house moves.