Time to corn up the lawn

I want to get serious about my lawn this year. Last year I didn't take very good care of it, and I regretted it later. Right now is the right time to put down a pre-emergent herbicide to keep any weed seeds that might be in my lawn from germinating. Since I'm almost entirely organic here, using harsh chemicals (both natural and man-made) only in the most extreme cases, I'm spreading corn on my lawn:

It's not whole grain corn, but a product made from corn gluten, which contains chemicals that prevent seeds from germinating. It also smells a little like corn chips.

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I've used this product for the last few years on the lawn and in flower beds (except for last year when I skipped the lawn) and it seems to work pretty well.

It's completely safe and doesn't have that horrid chemical odor that I smell on so many lawns each year.

But don't eat it!

It has some nutrients in it as well, which will help once the lawn starts waking up.

Oh good, my plants haven't been getting enough wheat middlings lately.

Unlike the synthetic products that can deliver their payloads immediately, organic products often need some time to start breaking down before they get to work, so I want to get this down early. With a pre-emergent, which doesn't do anything to kill existing weeds no matter how tiny they are, earlier is better.

I'm going to be using it on my front lawn:

I'll also put it down today on my buffalo grass lawn in my "prairie" garden:

Two problems with this. The lawn has a lot of leaves on it -- too many to ignore -- and the buffalo grass has several salvia carcasses hanging over it:

So before I can spread the corny pellets, I need to do a little cleanup. The leaves are important to get off because unlike freshly-fallen leaves they're matted down and will result in lots of little bare spots if I leave them too long:

There ended up being a lot more leaves than I thought:

The salvia stems were plentiful, but not too difficult to clip back:

I had to rake a little back here too, but once that was finished I used my drop spreader to apply the herbicide:

Besides being safe, another nice thing about a product like this is I don't have to worry so much about perfect coverage or overlapping passes. Applying too much in one area won't be a problem as it can be with synthetics.

Good thing too, because I put it down way too heavily in some areas:

I know that deer love corn, and I've often wondered if they would eat this stuff. I'll use this corn-heavy area as a test -- if they don't eat it here, they surely won't eat it when it's applied normally, where the tiny nuggets are almost undetectable:

I've not yet decided if I'm going to apply this to other parts of my lawn, because those parts are in really bad shape. I may need to reseed them, and if I'm going to do that I don't want pre-emergent there as it will prevent grass seed from germinating too. I may also strip those areas down to bare soil and start over, and in that case the corn gluten would just be wasted. So for now no gluten for the rest of the yard.

I did sprinkle it on some of the planting beds -- places I don't want anything to reseed. I also put some on the patio, hoping it will help keep down the amount of weeds that grow in the cracks this year.

I'm not sure exactly how long this stuff lasts and I will need to reapply in a few months, but I think it's one of the necessary steps to keep the weeds from taking over, and to keep me from having to write "did some more weeding today" posts every other day throughout the growing season.
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