Bulbs throughout newly seeded lawn
jrhartley
Posts: 2
Hello,
I know very little about gardens and lawns, so please forgive if this post is ignorant or naive.
Last year, whilst renovating our house we employed a landscape gardener to sort out the garden. It was heavily overgrown, a real mess being a probate sale, it hadn't been touched for years. As it is a sloping site, we had the lawn terraced using sleepers to make a level lawn. The whole thing was rotivated, and seeded.
This spring - 9 months on, the whole lawn is populated by what appear to be bluebells and other bulbs pushing through the lawn. I spoke to the landscape garden who carried out the work and he said just to keep mowing it and it would be fine. I asked him if the soil should have been prepared before seeding with a systematic weedkiller (e.g. RoundUp) and he said they had not.
Today I dug up a 600x600mm patch which had a number of visible bulbs on it and the photos show what I found - a variety of different bulb types between 6-12 inches below the surface of the lawn.
I was wondering of any of the experts or long-term gardeners on this forum might be able to advise me as a novice:
1) How would you expect to prepare soil ahead of seeding a new lawn? Is it normal to not use a weedkiller before seeding (obviously leaving the appropriate time for the weedkiller to not kill the lawn seed)?
2) Some of these bulbs are quite big - should they not have been sieved out in preparing the soil?
3) Will mowing the lawn frequently cause them to die back, or is this just wishful thinking from our landscape gardener? Everything I've read so far suggests that bulbs will keep coming back year after year and are even resistant to having systematic weedkiller painted on them.
4) I have read that some bulbs form runners under the surface so it is important to deal with the problem as soon as possible otherwise they will just spread. Is this correct?
5) Are there any selective weedkillers that can deal with bulbs without harming the lawn? I assume not, but I thought it was worth asking!
6) Assuming that there are no selective weedkillers that will act on bulbs - what are our options to get the decent grass lawn we thought we had paid for - do we need to dig it all up and carefully remove the hundreds of bulbs of varying sizes that are in the soil under the lawn?
7) If we have to go down the path of 6) - would it be fair to say that this is an expense we shouldn't have to incur and the problem should have been avoided in the first place by the landscape gardener doing his preparation properly?
Sorry for the long list of dumb questions, grateful in advance for any advice or suggestions to remedy.
Posts
Bulbs rely on their leaves to build themselves up for flowering the next year. Remove the leaves and you remove their ability to flower and ultimately to survive, therefore the mower is your friend in your battle against these "pests".
Your contractor should certainly have prepared the soil properly. This means digging over - whch would have turned up all but the deepest bulbs - raking and levelling. Looks like he's skimped on the preparation. You have a mixture there - the big bulb in the first photo looks like a daffodil, and the others could be bluebells.
The counsel of perfection would be to complain to the contractor - he hasn't done the work properly, but no doubt has charged you for it. However, he'll say that you should have said you wanted the bulbs removed....
Regular mowing will kill them and the nearby grass plants will fill the gaps. Or you could let them grow and enjoy the flowers - mow round them till the leaves die down. I'm not aware of any plants that produce bulbs and runners.
Quite right about weedkiller - what kills one will kill the other. And nothing that could have been applied before sowing would have been suitable.
No such thing as dumb questions on here, and the only way to overcome ignorance and naivite is learning and experience.
Me - I'd just carry on mowing over them - as Ceres and Stev say. I just wish I could do the same in the borders where these darned Spanish bluebells abound
Thank you all for your advice.