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I always looked forward to the time of year when all of the hard work that you put into your customers’ lawns has finally paid off. If you’ve timed your fertilizer correctly – and your customer hasn’t scalped the lawn down to putting green height – the color will last until about Christmas. Hopefully. I […]
This month, I am going to discuss a coin with two sides. I can hear you saying, “Bob, coins always have two sides!” Yeah, I know that. I think. Maybe. When I run into people that I haven’t seen in a while and they ask about how my job at NALP is going, some will […]
I get to do some very cool things in my job, not the least of which is to represent the landscape industry in organizations dedicated to the stewardship of pesticides. In this case, I am referring to The Pesticide Stewardship Alliance, a group consisting of cooperative extension folks, pesticide safety educators, registrants (a fancy name […]
Back before I joined NALP, I spent quite a bit of my time training new lawn specialists. That includes teaching problem-solving, a proficiency that takes a very long time to master. While it is very true that some of the problems we encounter in caring for turfgrass are pest-related, many times, the problems are due […]
This coming Labor Day will mark the sixth anniversary of my second career of government relations. Before that, I was in lawn care, working for myself and for others over the course of thirty seasons. I use the word ‘season’ instead of ‘years’ because, in the lawn care industry, we mark time in terms of […]
Winter…Not the agronomist’s favorite season, at least in the northern states anyway. If it’s not brown, it’s covered in a blanket of white and in either case, it’s frozen solid. This time of year, I love a trip down to Florida for a few days. Speaking of Florida, I headed down to Orlando in early […]
It’s been a long, hard season, hasn’t it? Every year it’s something: last year, it was armyworms eating half of the lawns in America; this year, for most of us, it simply did not rain. Will it be a plague of locusts next year? Who knows? On the one hand, the challenges we face in […]
You know when people start making jokes incorporating camels and lawns that it wasn’t a banner summer for most of us. The U.S. Drought Monitor map, released each Thursday by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, depicted ever-increasing areas of the country that were deficient in precipitation, while evapotranspiration data from […]
I have a stunning admission to make. I love lawn weeds. I know, I know. You don’t need to tell me. Failure to control weeds is the number one reason that lawn care customers cancel their services. And yes, I have battled the dastardly dandelion and the crafty clover in lawns for years. Most of […]
As goes Round 1, so goes the season. Or at least that’s the saying in the lawn care business; the first visit to a customer’s home and the quality of the application sets the tone for the rest of the year. This is not only true for agronomics but also from the perspective of customer […]