The “One-Time Fix” Fantasy A few years ago, I was standing in the backyard of a prospective client’s home, discussing what it would take to improve his lawn. He could afford the work. That was not the issue. What he really wanted to know was whether there was one...

Balanced Horizon is the point where the soil is no longer simply keeping grass alive—it is working as an efficient, living system. A lawn can look green because it has been pushed with water and fertilizer. That does not necessarily mean it is healthy. A truly healthy...

Automation Isn’t the Enemy. Waste Is. For more than 30 years, I have watched the lawn-care industry try to solve the same problems with the same basic system: put people on trucks, move them from property to property, burn fuel, race the weather, and hope enough...

Are We About to Repeat 2012? The Lawn-Water Cycle We Can Still Break Before 2027 If you lived through 2012 and 2013 along the Front Range, you probably remember the feeling. Water restrictions. Hotter-than-normal temperatures. Brown lawns. Rising anxiety. Homeowners...

Lawn Anxiety: Why Panic Is Costing Homeowners Money There is a kind of anxiety that comes with owning a lawn that nobody really talks about. The grass starts turning brown. A few strange patches show up. The weather gets hot. The lawn doesn't seem to respond the way...

The silver lining may not be conservation alone. It may be strategy. Colorado has a water problem. I don’t think there is much value in pretending otherwise. But I also believe there is a silver lining buried inside the problem—because the answer may not be...

The Most Expensive Thing in Lawn Care Is the Mindset One of the greatest frustrations I have after spending decades in the lawn and landscape industry is realizing just how much unnecessary waste we have accepted as normal. Waste of water. Waste of fertilizer. Waste...

Denver Should Learn From Colorado Springs Before We Repeat 2012 Colorado has seen this movie before. And we should be very careful about how we write the ending this time. In 2012, Colorado Springs experienced an extraordinarily hot and dry year. Temperatures reached...

Most people who have heard of soil pH know that 7 is neutral, numbers below 7 are acidic, and numbers above 7 are alkaline. But that doesn't really explain why pH matters. For a lawn, pH is less like a nutrient and more like an access-control system. You can have...

We live in a world where a package arriving in three days feels like a logistical failure. We can order dinner from the couch, watch an entire television season in a weekend, and become irritated when a website takes four seconds to load. Then we plant grass and...

A few times a year, Mother Nature gives the lawn care business a good beating. Rain moves in. The ground gets soaked. The grass stays wet. And we face the same miserable choice: take our licking and wait for conditions to improve, or try to mow anyway and risk...

Colorado’s Water Future Needs More Than a Smaller Lawn I believe in conservation. Watering sidewalks, running sprinklers through a rainstorm, and ignoring a broken irrigation system make no sense. But neither does turning grass into the convenient villain of...