Last Updated on January 9, 2025 by Brian Beck
I had a customer several years ago, who had been a customer for well over a decade that was really struggling with our biological program. He did not see the purpose and it although he told me he read all of my blogs and newsletters, he did not see the value in it. His lawn was in a very problematic area of town that had extremely poor soil that caused several conditions that required routine remediation. When we switch to the biological program he was very hesitant to switch gears and allow us to properly take care of his lawn. I told him that the most important thing that he could do was to have us conduct a soil test so that we could identify and pinpoint the failures in his soil and then construct a program that would be unique to his particular situation. He was engaged in a very basic, general-purpose form of our biological program that in time does solve the problem but is based upon operating without a soil test. This method unfortunately prevents us from arriving at the specific issue that exists in that particular soil. He asked me one time, “If you knew something was wrong with my soil why would you continue to treat it in the manner that you are doing?” I simply replied, “You have never allowed us to conduct a soil test that would allow us to more quickly solve the problem.” The soil test is not that expensive and it will always pay for itself in time regardless of the expense of the corrective action. A fully functional soil will save over 50% of its water alone and this is not counting all of the other symptoms that contribute to the cost of maintaining a lawn such as aeration, power raking, weed control and disease control, all of which we were doing on his lawn. Unfortunately for this particular customer he was unable to adopt the new method that would have spared him thousands of dollars and instead disengaged and began to treat his own lawn. Now this is definitely not a success story but it can be for you as it is a cautionary tale of what not to do in the face of opportunity and discovery. I have never discovered a lawn that I could not fix provided that the customer was willing. We can do a lot with any lawn, are you willing?
