The Modified Plan to Tame the Lawn

New Process for Ridding the Lawn of Sandburs.

I have modified the original plan a little bit.  Since the lawn is so large, it is difficult to do much detailed work in a timely fashion.  So I have accelerated some parts of the plan.

I started picking the sandbur seeds then spraying the plant with Diquat Bromide.  There are a few issues with this.  

1. it is very slow.  One plant can have dozens of seed heads on it.  
2. it is not very thorough.  One plant may have already dropped dozens of seeds that I cannot possibly pick up
3. I have noticed that many plants I have sprayed were able to put on new seeds in the 36 hours it takes to Diquat to kill them.
4. At some point I still have to mow the lawn, regardless of if there are sandbur seedheads waiting to be picked or not.

I modified my original plan.  I found that sandburs can be easily dug up by whacking them with a hoe.  This essentially gets all the seed heads at one time.  It also gets a lot of the fallen seeds that have fallen in the clump of blades at the bottom of the plant.  It is REALLY easy to dig them up, way easier than picking the seeds.  I also see no repeat offenders. 

The only drawback is that I have to dispose of significantly more material.  In the first 3 weeks of picking the seed and killing the weed, I disposed of 5 - 5-gallon buckets of seed heads.  With the new process, I have disposed of 16 - 5-gallon buckets of material in 2 days.

Since this is so much faster, I can clear the entire 2 acres in just a few days, working a few hours each day.

Also, I get poked a LOT less with this method.  

Directional Mowing

I still mow the lawn blowing all the debris inward.  That will help wrangle all the seeds in a smaller area for future eradication (if needed.)

Cordone off the Lawn

I divided the lawn into strategic areas that are organized in priority of cleanliness.

For instance:

The front yard will be more important than the back yard.

The areas near the house will be more important than the areas further away from the house.

I have divided the front lawn into 4 areas and the back yard into 6 areas.

The regions within 30 feet of the house gets cleaned of sandburs every single day.

The next regions out from the house get cleaned often, but only after the regions closer to the house are completed.

This process provides affirmative progress since we never push into less clean areas until the more clean areas are cleaned again.  Essentially, we are claiming territory by cleaning it, then we give it the most care to hold that territory.  Only after we have confirmed that territory is still clean do we move out to other, less clean areas.

I do this for everything I do.  When I dethatch, I will dethatch the clean areas first.  then I will remove all the thatch and move to the next area.  This will reduce the amount of seeds carried from a less clean area to a more clean area.  For instance, I will never dethatch across a clean area and a less clean area at one time.  I would dethatch the clean area completely, then move to the less clean area.