I am writing this letter in hopes that you can avoid the terrible mistake I have made.
Last year I hired a local landscape company to help establish a new lawn. I purchased through them ten truckloads of top soil, raked in my grass seed and started watering. My poor grass seedlings never had a chance because the top soil was infested with a super weed called Kochia. This weed is completely immune to broadleaf herbicides, certainly any that are certified for a lawn application. It completely took over the entire area. I tried mowing, but it was able to produce millions of seeds below the height of my mower blades.
I called the local Extension Office and they suggested that I pull the weeds by hand. The new “lawn” is 18,225 square feet and I can easily count 30 Kochia plants per square foot. That is over a half million Kochia plants to pull by hand!
Oh, and did I mention that the top soil was permeated with broken automobile glass? My wife and I filled a 3-pound coffee can in an hour but that didn’t stop my dog from gashing his foot. When the sun is right, my yard absolutely glitters! Apparently the soil came from an old auto wrecking yard outside of Missoula. I can only guess what kinds of waste oil and other toxic chemicals are polluting my would be yard.
So I am hopeful you can learn from my mistake. First, make sure that any top soil you get has been run through a blast furnace to kill any seed. Second, I’ll bet there are other reputable landscaping companies out there where you can get your “soil and timber.”
I sure hope you can avoid my mistakes because, at 63 years old, I’ll be long dead before the Kochia is gone from my property, if it is ever gone.
Dick Fichtler
Florence