Lawn care advice: grubs (1 Viewer)

[Brett_H]

All,

My wife and I recently moved into our first home, and we're both complete novices at lawn care. Our yard is starting to turn ugly, and we're guessing it's due to grubs. There are irregular sports of dead grass showing up along with a lot of birds that seem to be feeding on something white.

We bought a spreader and some grub control stuff from Lowes (can't recall the name of it now) and put that down a few weeks ago. The front yard seems to be getting worse, while the back looks the same or maybe a bit better.

Any suggestions on what to do now? Once grubs attack your lawn, do you have to replace the dead grass, or will it grow back on its own. Are we SOL for this season now, or is there anything we can do to restore things before the real heat of summer hits?

Thanks,
-Brett.

 

[Joe Szott]

They have stuff at home depot and lowes called "Tricytlcine" (sp?!?) or something similar. It does a very good job or killing whatever nasties live under the lawn while leaving the grass alive. We had a bad grub outbreak last year and a couple generous doses of that stuff killed them all. It's all over in the garden section, take a peek.

The grass doesn't grow back though if it is a sizable patch (bigger than say a frisbee), you'll have to redo that. Easiest way is to take a hand spade or rake and pull up / mulch the old grass into the earth, then apply some patch master and keep it wet for a week or two. If it is a really large area (say 100 sq ft +), then you'll want to rototil the soil and resod the whole thing at once.

It will take a few days to kill the grubs completely and a few weeks to get grass growing again. No worries though, you could probably be back in the green by this Fall...

 

[Tim Fennell]

GrubEx is pretty good for a chemical treatment. Once it kills the grubs the birds, possums and racoons still dig them up even though they're dead - in my experience.

Eventually the animals will give up.

I used something called Milky SPore. It takes a year or 2 to become totally effective but once it is established it works for 10-20 years. It is expensive $75/10K square feet, but once you get it down it works for years. Also it is only harmful to grubs, you can spread it in your garden and not worry about it.

It works by doing something to the blood of japanese beetle grubs. They just die and once they do the milky spore goes inert inside the grub.

Tim

 

[Jay Heyl]

I've never used them, but nematodes are said to be pretty effective. A friend used them in his garden and was pretty happy with the results.

 

[Greg_L_C]

Before you spend any more mony on grub treatment, make sure thats what is causing your problems. Other turf grass diseases look like the damage that grubs cause. look on the web for information. here is a good article from Texas A&M link

Greg

 

[NathanH]

If you DO have grub problems, use dylox 6.2G. My neighbor is a lawncare consultant (does work for the Indianapolis Colts' turf), and told me to use this when my entire lawn became infested. Those suckers were gone in a week.

 

[Brett_H]

Guys,

I think I've got two problems here:

1. I never verified that I do in fact have grubs. I need to do that this weekend by doing some digging.
2. If I do have them, the first time I treated the lawn it was probably not effective because I didn't properly water it after applying. I didn't have a sprinkler at the time, so I just used the hose to wet it down. The other night, I decided to reapply the stuff I used before, only this time I soaked it for about an hour with my newly purchased sprinkler (which may have been a waste of time...see #1).

I'm going to do some investigating this weekend and see where it goes from there.

Thanks for helping me out!

-Brett.

 

[mike_frontier]

Hi,

I had a bad taste of Grubs on my lawn and even when I treated it the lawn where the grubs were at was still there and were not dead.

I myself replaced the dead grass and raked it out and tilled the dirt, and below the dirt were those ugly grubs,, which I smashed w/ my shovel .


Once you replace your grass always and I mean always ever 2-3 months put GrubEx on the lawn,, but make sure to water the grass before putting it on and then water after laying GrubEx.