Prak_Anima wrote:I'm not a god damned botanist or fucking horticulturist.
And oddly enough I am.
You however are an idiot advocating bad ideas in both gardening and basic social morality.
And do you REALLY want to know how to create a rich lush lawn? It's probably at least a three year fucking course at your local community technical college or equivalent.
Not being a specialist in the field and being generally against lawns as a high maintenance low reward and environmentally unsound gardening option I can only tell you so much.
But I can tell you enough to make you go "BORING, can't we just KILL SOMETHING! WITH CHEMICALS OR FIRE, LULZ!"
Yeah, because someone who's been told "just make sure the grass doesn't get above *here*" really wants to learn that shit.
And if you don't at least consult an expert in that shit there is a good chance you will have a large patch of dirt, ash, more weeds and some scarce pieces of grass at the end of your plan.
And NO lawn expert (or none worth a damn) is going to tell you what you need to do without finding out about the local microclimate in the backyard and some idea of the soil quality and profile.
Short story. Grass variety must be selected for the available sun and temperatures. Top soil will probably need improving, ideally with mulch, manure, and either sand or clay additives depending on what sort of soil is already there. If you are basically on top of building scrap from the house (like many suburban yards) then you will be in for a lot more than that and may even need to remove existing "soil" in large quantities.
To properly prepare the soil for a really nice lawn you could spend about a year messing with the soil before even laying turf or sewing seeds.
Once the seeds are sown or turf is laid you will need to perform some careful and regular maintenance for a while, months easily. Certainly a lot of watering at least, and hope that you don't get too badly dried or washed out by the weather in that period.
IF the lawn gets established you may well face, numerous, complications that will require all kinds of work up to and including scrapping the lot and starting again.
Lawns are not low maintenance even if you already have one. Actually establishing a good one is not an easy thing, especially in a degraded weed infested situation where all other factors are unknown and put deeply into questionable territory by the context.
What about getting a Mantis egg sack? ... But, it'd do something. Something natural even.
Well it wouldn't do much as I'm pretty sure mantis's do not primarily eat bees.
Indeed those few approved and commercially available predatory bugs purchasable in Australia are not actually targeted to eat bees, since everyone
who is sane doesn't have a problem with bees.
If you want to have something that eats bees you probably need a Bee Eater. Thats a bird. They eat bees by the hundreds. But, that still wont stop bees from turning up. And indeed odds are good that in the given situation a Bee Eater would just starve to death because there are nowhere near enough bees around in the first place.
I mean you'd basically have to get a bee hive just to feed your damn Bee Eater.
Anyway. Biological control of "pests" is certainly NOT automatically
good for the environment we here in Australia have a thing called the Cane Toad, it's a good reminder of this simple fact.
And regardless of the safety of the methodology the FIRST step in pest control is to make an actual sane judgment as to whether it is required. And you do NOT need to control bees in any sort of normal backyard environment. ITS A STUPID IDEA.
You don't want bees, you don't plant flowers. Especially certain sorts of flowers. You might get away with a limited range of flowers that bees don't especially like, but almost no one keeps track of that (since no one normally cares if bees don't like certain flowers). I could suggest some flowers that are preferred primarily by flies instead? But they wouldn't be suitable for the garden or gardener anyway. And they smell really bad.
Also. Don't paint things with honey, or leave anything sweet lying around. Or have water of any kind available just in case yours is the only watering hole in the entire bee territory. Then don't have a lawn, or weeds, or plant (or even animal) life of any kind.
You should probably also stop breathing and bury yourself in a air tight plastic coffin beneath three meters of concrete. That MIGHT keep the bees out.
Then what the fuck should she do? She's stated the situation perfectly clearly. All you've done is call people idiots for giving her the simple solution.
Really? I though I gave actual gardening advice and called YOU an idiot for telling her to burn down her yard and by a likely not coincidental chain of events possibly her house, suburb or state, remember, again, Australia, highly flammable.
People who don't, by the way, live in Australia, and have no real reason to know all the fucking ins and outs of your ecosystem of death.
It's not much different from yours. Find a good horticulturist or even avid gardener and they will tell you VERY similar things about your area.
Nature is everywhere and pouring chemicals on it and setting it on fire is generally a bad idea where-ever you find it.
