Scotts Lawns

From the first name in lawns comes the last word on lawn care! Scotts Lawns brings you all the experience and insight of the nation's foremost experts on growing the perfect lawn. Here you'll find the secrets of success for your yard -- you'll have fewer weeds and greener grass -- all explained in easy-to-follow steps. You'll be amazed by how uncomplicated it is, and your neighbors will be asking you for your secrets.

Review
Don't let the branding fool you -- this is easily the best book on lawns currently available. I've read many books on the subject, and most of them are very simplistic and useless, or spend some time on the lawn and then go off into growing vegetables or flowers. This one is just on lawns, and contains sections on lawn weeds, lawn pests, types of grass -- basically everything you could think to ask or need to know about how to maintain a great lawn.

Makes a terrific housewarming gift, too. I wish someone had given me one!

Price: $13.50

Scotts Lawns
by Nick Christians, Ashton Ritchie

Price: $13.50

The Healthy Lawn Handbook

The book was simple enough to not be boring, but in depth enough to tell everything I possibly wanted to know. I have read books that told me more than I needed, and I never finished them. I have also read through far too many that simply said nothing. This one was right in the middle and perfect for me. I bought several for friends who liked it as well.

Winward obviously has a big organic bent, because most solutions he gives are organic. I think more people than just myself will like this. You hard core chemical users will find some fair stuff, but probably not as much as your drooling to get. Anyway, I recommend it.

Reviewer: David J Crane
The easy step by step approach illustrated by the author was a miracle cure for my yard. I aerate correctly now, and boy it makes all the difference.

I was never privileged to have the time to learn what I needed to know in order to take care of my lawn, using the regular methods such as practical experience and personal experimentation. But I have always desired to have that knowledge anyway. Thank heavens Author Lane Winward found the time to learn eveything about lawns. Even more to the point, thank heavens he documented them.

Reviewer: Cindy Lu Cazier

I found the information in this book easy to retrieve and easy to apply. The pictures were lovely and the methods outlined have truly worked for me. The writing style was not over bearing and boring. Others book like this are more like encyclopedias and are not so easy to read and understand. I actually do have the greenest lawn in my neighborhood.

Price: $18.95

The Healthy Lawn Handbook
by Lane L. Winward

Price: $18.95

Southern Lawns

Product Description:
Son of renowned horticulturist Don Hastings, Chris Hastings presents his readers with step-by-step instructions for year-round care of lawns from Virginia to Texas.

Review:
This book covers all the main grass types common to warm season and transitional lawns. Each grass type includes wonderful photographs of the grass, how to maintain that grass with particular emphasis on mowing, watering, fertilization (both when and what to use), aerating, dethatching, topdressing, weed controls, and major pests and diseases that attack that grass. The last 1/3 of the book includes a month-by-month timetable of what to do to make your southern lawn the best it can be.

Price: $16.47

Southern Lawns by Chris Hastings

Price: $16.47

Building a Healthy Lawn

From Book News, Inc.
On mowing, watering, fertilizing, soil building, thatch, equipment selection, seeding, weed control, diseases, and insects. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Product Description:
Included are chapters on mowing, watering, fertilizing, soil building, equipment selection, seeding, weed control, diseases and insects, ground covers, and mulches.

Reviewer: A reader
This book is SUCH an easy read. It explains everything you'd need to know in plain english and gives many real life examples. I've just started to put what I've learned in the book into practice and I can't wait to see the results.
Two things would have made this a better book: 1) a tearout that can be used as a quick reference guide and 2) it really could use to be updated. It was written in 1986 and many organic and chemical products have been introduced since then that I would like to get his take on.

Reviewer: A reader
I was quite starved for information to help me repair drought damage to my front lawn as well as seed a new lawn from scratch in the backyard. I read the book from cover to cover quite quickly and I feel somewhat enlightened. The concepts put forth by Stuart et al for maintaining a healthy lawn are quite simple to understand and execute. Each aspect from choosing a grass type to how to effectively seed and then eventually maintain your lawn is covered in detail in its own chapter. One aspect of the book which I particularly enjoyed was the explanations of exactly what you need to do to cause problems in your yard. I think sometimes its just as important to be informed how to to screw up as it is to do things right. Sometimes people can accidently kill their lawns without the knowledge of exactly what they are doing wrong. The book covers the functions of different chemical approaches to lawn care, but maintains that natural care is the most cost effective and safest way to maintain a lawn in the long term. I was very impressed by the book, and would highly recommend it to anyone.

Reviewer: W. McClellan
This is the best book I have read on the topic. It is clearly written, and loaded with useful information. I recommend it as a great book for those who want to understand why their lawn looks so bad.

Reviewer: A reader
This book teaches proper lawn care in an extremely easy-to-understand manner. It tells you all about the right and wrong ways of mowing, and how much of a difference it can actually make to the health and appearance of your lawn. It lets you in on the secrets that professional lawn people use. Most importantly, this book tells you how to care for lawns with little or no Pesticides. I think every homeowner with any sense of environmental responsibility should read this book before they mow their lawn again.

Price: $10.17

Building a Healthy Lawn by
Stuart Franklin

Price: $10.17

Lawn Care for Dummies

Product Description:
Only one thing is standing between you and a fabulous lawn: It's called Lawn Care For Dummies. If you want a spiffy and well-coifed lawn (and not the overgrown, unruly one that people comment on when they pass by your house), you'll find everything you need to know to help you make your lawn the most dazzling spectacle on the block.

Let authors Lance Walheim and the gardening experts at the National Gardening Association treat you and your yard to a megadose of lawn care information. In Lawn Care For Dummies, Walheim and the NGA give you the dirt on all the essentials, including how to

• Design a low-maintenance or a high-maintenance lawn
• Evaluate the pros and cons of planting a lawn from seed or starting one from sod
• Discover how often you need to water your lawn without under-watering it or waterlogging it
• Choose a mower that's right for your grass type
• Deal effectively with wicked weeds and pesky insects
• Create alternative lawns, such as ground cover plants, decks, and patios

Lawn Care For Dummies also features a beautiful color insert with photos illustrating the various types of lawns found in yards across the world.

Reviews:
I planted my first lawn from scratch this Spring, and spent a lot of time reading and re-reading this book. The advice the book gave was great, particularly when it came to selecting the type of grass to plant for my particular needs and in my area.
The other reviewers are correct about the photos being not very useful, but they certainly are pretty! However, I found the author's descriptions of grass types to be very clear and putting pictures of grass types would have been redundant.

There were a few things that could have used more coverage, though. In particular, the description of the various options in boundaries and edgings was difficult to follow with very few pictures. Plus, the section on sprinklers touched on only about half of the types of sprinklers offered by my local garden center.

My neighbor across the street planted his lawn at the same time I did mine, but without the book. He's a nice guy, but his lawn is a joke! Maybe I'll loan him my book this Fall when he starts over....

Having never had a lawn before, I needed a very basic, gentle introduction to what it means to have and care for a lawn - and this book delivers just that. It also covers topics I might not have thought about ahead of time, including lawn disease and alternate ground covers. The ambient sense of humor makes what could appear to be a very intimidating project seem more like fun than work. My only objection - the color photos are wasted on shots of random lawns. I would have preferred to see these photos used to show examples that are best viewed, rather than textually described... such as grass types, insect & disease damage, weeds, etc.

Overall, this book has given me a great overview of my entire lawn project, and I can't wait to get started.

Price: $13.59

Lawn Care for Dummies by
Lance Walheim

Price: $13.59

Suburban Safari:
A Year on the Lawn

When science writer Hannah Holmes decided to spend a year studying the inhabitants of her 0.2-acre patch of ground in suburban Portland, Maine, she went about the task with an ecologist's enthusiasm and a scientist's compulsive eye for detail. The result is an entertaining and effortlessly compelling examination of nature's stubborn (and successful) struggle to exist in the face of daunting manmade challenges.

Holmes's lawn, unfertilized and rarely mowed, turns out to be a surprisingly diverse ecosystem of bird, mammal, and insect life--a self-perpetuating, constantly evolving community of chipmunks, ladybugs, spiders, slugs, and crows. These creatures, and the complex relationships between them, are the raw material for Holmes's incisive reflections on natural history, urban ecology, and the ignominious story of the over-irrigated, pesticide-laced American lawn--rolling out, Holmes notes, at a rate of one million acres per year.

What drives Holmes is not just concern for the natural environment but a ravenous curiosity about every aspect of the world around her, from the sex lives of dragonflies and squirrels, to the murderous tendencies of the English sparrows that have colonized her land, to the survival strategies of the mosquitoes, sow bugs, and slugs that inhabit her yard by the hundreds. Holmes is an environmentalist to the core, but she never sermonizes.

With Suburban Safari, an intimate, wry, and often challenging look at a world most of us never bother to notice, she ably demonstrates humanity's responsibility to a natural world that exists all around us--even in our own backyards. --Erica C. Barnett

Product Description:
Who knew that an investigation into that patch of grass in our backyards could be so fruitful-and so funny?

More than 550 square miles of new lawns unfold each year in the U.S. alone. Although new research shows that these lawns aren't nearly as "unnatural" as ecologists once thought, no one has offered an accessible exploration of this novel habitat. Until now...

Equipped with a lawn chair and her infectious curiosity, science writer Hannah Holmes spends a year on her lawn hoping to discover exactly what's going on out there. Under her examination, the lawn teems with life, populated by a bewilderment of birds, a mess of mammals, and a range of plants that record the history of this little piece of ground.

As the seasons progress, she guides us through this bustling community, inviting over biologists, ecologists, botanists, entomologists, and energy experts to further unveil the complexities of life in the 'burbs. Through this investigation, we encounter life-and-death dramas and mysteries that would make a rainforest blush—everything from the behavior of suburban crows and raccoons, to the way plants wage war, to the puzzle of baby pigeons (where are they?).

Funny, smart, and refreshing, Suburban Safari introduces us to a world so extraordinary it's hard to believe it's been right in front of us all along.

Review:
Looking for some books to read before going on vacation recently, I was drawn to "Suburban Safari" for a number of reasons, not in the least because I live in the 'burbs myself, with a backyard, and not much of a gardner frankly.

"Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn" is the hilarious tale by the author of how she experienced life in her yard for one whole year. It's amazing what all happens. Bugs, plants, birds, flowers, grass, it all grows and interacts in one way or another. From the book inside cover, I gather that Hannah Holmes has made her name through various science-related writings. It goes to the author's credit that she keeps the book as unscientific as possible, and with a healthy dose of humor. The pages just fly by. In all, if you're looking for a fun yet informative read, "Suburban Safari" easily fits the bill. Highly recommended, and I know that I won't look at my backyard ever the same way again!

Battling crickets. Tailless squirrels. Weeds as our friends. Crow antics. A Cheeky chipmunk. Drama, comedy, and huge life and death decisions compete for writer Hannah Holmes's attention out on her two tenths of an acre back lawn. This is a wonderful book in so many ways.

Number one - it's beautifully written. Passionate, funny, informative, and engrossing, Holmes's prose has been honed as fine as one blade of feral grass on the Freedom Lawn she so treasures in her back yard.

Number two - it's chock full of details regarding some of the common, yet extraordinary, things we see every day. The reader may laugh over the antics of Holmes's crows, but at the same time, she is teaching us about crow ecology—what they contribute to our environment and why they're important. She does this with each carefully considered topic—from why weeds are good to how many threads make up Babbette the spider's web in her study.

Number three—A Year on the Lawn is an important educational and ecological tool that would be a great asset to high school science classes.

Number four - things we idly wonder about while sipping iced tea in our own backyards are honored here in spades. This is a great read, no matter the season, whether you're on a summer-kissed deck or looking out at the piles of snow covering the backyard grill. Move it to the top of your pile.

Price: $16.47

Suburan Safari: A year on the Lawn by
Hannah Holmes

Price: $16.47

Green Grass Magic

Product Description:
This definitive lawn-care guide provides professional secrets, seasonal tips, and recipes for homemade fertilizers to improve the attractiveness and health of grass from seed to sod. Insider tips include how to avoid the most common mowing blunders, cure yellow grass with Epsom salts, and bug-proof a lawn with mouthwash. A detailed lawn-care calendar offers season-by-season advice on maintaining a thick, green lawn. Do-it-yourself homeowners, green thumbs, and gardening beginners will benefit from the tested, effective strategies for growing hearty grass using safe, inexpensive, natural products.

Price: $19.77

Green Grass Magic by
Jerry Baker

Price: $19.77

Safe & Easy Lawn Care

From the original TAYLOR'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GARDENING, published in 1936, to the current best-selling Taylor's Master Guide to Gardening, the Taylor name has stood for the very best information available to American gardeners. Now this all-new series extends the market to new gardeners (and new garden-book buyers).

Like the other best-selling members of the Taylor's Guide family, Taylor's Weekend Gardening Guides including: Safe and Easy Lawn Care; Window Boxes; Organic Pest and Disease Control; and Birds and Butterflies; offer the exceptionally high standards of excellence that gardeners have come to rely on.

The Weekend Gardening Guides are designed for gardeners who are looking for practical information on specific topics from a source they can trust. Attractively priced and beautifully illustrated with more than 50 full-color photos and helpful color drawings, each Taylor's Weekend Gardening Guide is written by a popular, respected, and nationally known gardening expert.

Price: $10.36

Safe & Easy Lawn Care by
Barbara Ellis

Price: $10.36

Turfgrass Maintenance Reduction Handbook: Sports, Lawns, and Golf

Product Description:
Encyclopedic coverage of sure-fire strategies for maintaining your lawn, sports field, golf course, or park in perfect condition while using less water, fertilizer, mowing, pesticide, and labor!

A major strength o the book is the wealth of information presented on management strategies, complete with do-it-yourself instructions for site selection, soil preparation, seed rates and planting, turf establishment, and renovation. Time and cost-saving techniques for effective mowing, thatch control, pest management, water conservation, water management, fertilizer use, stress management, and pest management are presented in a user-friendly manner—complete with helpful checklists, and step-by-step instructions. A vast amount of useful reference material will ensure the success of your maintenance program. No other book covers virtually every aspect of successful turf management.

Features:

• Covers every aspect of a successful turfgrass maintenance program.
• Presents hundreds of cost-saving methods.
• Tips to reduce labor.
• Simple step-by-step instructions.
• Hundreds of photographs and drawings.
• Encyclopedic reference material.
• Unique turf selection guidelines.
• Fundamentals of turfgrass soils.

Golf course superintendants and turfgrass managers all seem to concur that the major expense of any professional turf is not the initial cost of construction, but rather, the cost and commitment required for its maintenance.
Few textbooks specifically address this issue, but Dr. Brede's book does. He presents, in great detail, and with a view towards educating the reader, why the choice of a turfgrass is critical, how to make that choice, and how to maintain it with less-intensive management practices than may currently be in vogue.

Subsequent chapters develop strategies for reducing maintenance, based on the results of current research: use less fertilizer, use less water, and lighten mowing. These are presented after a step-by-step procedure for establishing/renovating a turf area, as well as a practical treatment on turf soils, discussing issues such as thatch, soil compaction, and the effects of salts. He also presents strategies for controlling insects/pests on turfgrasses, many of which employ changes in management practices rather than application of chemicals. Also, don't miss the appendix, which is an exhaustive list of unconventional turfgrasses.

Dr. Brede's advice is based on his own field experience, combined with his education and research in the turfgrass sciences, and may be some of the best-kept secrets in the turfgrass industry.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is planning a new construction or the reconstruction of a turf area—choose the correct turfgrass for your site, and maintain it with a less-intensive management program. You'll likely spend less money and have more time to enjoy using the turf than struggling with its maintenance.

Price: $87.31

Turfgrass Maintenance Reduction Hand...
Doug Brede

Price: $87.31