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Been diving deep into lawn care recently. There's a TON, literally hundreds, of products you can spread on your lawn. There's 250 days of the growing season to

Been diving deep into lawn care recently. There's a TON, literally hundreds, of products you can spread on your lawn. There's 250 days of the growing season to apply those hundreds of products on. And does it work? Well, this internet comment written by so and so says it does, and their lawn is beautiful, but which of the 15 things they're doing are most pivotal? Or is it multivariate and all the parameters matter and affect and interact with each other? Unfortunately, I believe it's the latter complex case. pH matters a lot, that affects fertilization uptake, but so does soil bacteria and organic matter, lack of bugs and diseases, proper moisture, and the physical act of cutting the grass is an art and skill, not a mere chore. Oof, plants need a lot of variables to be in the right ranges, and with soil and watering and weather, it's a lot of fluctuation on top of it all.

colechristensen 5y ago
This is a problem all over, from health advice to cooking to skincare, lawn care, etc. etc. etc. A complex system with many variables and optimum points trying to be solved with anecdotes, magical cures, and "good for you" products.
- eru 5y ago
  A good place to study human confirmation bias.
- Larrikin 5y ago
  Atleast with cooking I've collected a few sources that are consistently good. For new recipes I follow them exactly the first time and disregard any source that has had more than a couple not great recipes, specifically any recipe on all recipes that not a sponsored professional chef.
  - tompazourek 5y ago
    When cooking, we often optimize for flavor and texture. But what about digestion and nutrition and how each person has different preferences and a different body? It starts getting very complicated quite fast, so many variables...
  - quietbritishjim 5y ago
    The parent comment's point is not that there is no good cooking advice out there, but instead that there are enough variables that it can't be taken at face value. I've used a recipe that have worked very well for me but then gave radically different results when I used a different casserole dish. I managed to fix it by taking the lid off later in the process and adjusting the oven temperature by 30°C. Not many recipes mention that amount of temperature variation depending on what cooking equipment you're using.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    (for cooking, but also others) There usually are good sources and they fall under two categories (or both): very precise procedure which was actually tested or technique and feedback focused information. The latter being far more important. How to adjust, signs to look for (sound, smell, taste, sight), the proper uses of tools, etc. "This is how I do it!" blog kinds of recipes usually suffer from hidden techniques or undocumented variables where you try it yourself and it's just awful. In other words, good advice involves science and art, not just one-off reports of success.
    - jamincan 5y ago
      The problem, of course, is that advice focusing on technique and feedback is a lot harder to pass on, and a lot harder to absorb. It's the difference between a 30 second tik tok clip and a one hour in-depth on par-baking pie crusts.
- mabub24 5y ago
  For a lot of these things, the steps to finding something that works should start with seeing someone who is a specialist of some sort, and, if at all possible, getting them to actually look at whatever you need help for. For skincare, see a dermatologist. Anyone with skincare issues or concerns, PLEASE just see a dermatologist. They might not tell you what you want to hear, but they can usually give you a good baseline description and diagnosis of what to work on. That's 99% of the battle. For lawn care, try to talk to a lawn care specialist, hopefully someone who is not trying to sell you something. Golf courses usually have 1 or 2 people that know a lot about grass. Even someone that you think has a really good lawn, ask them to come over and take a look at yours. Getting advice off the internet is helpful, but I've usually found it to not beat getting someone in person who can actually look at what ever the thing is you're looking for advice for.
  - aspaceman 5y ago
    This is funny because when I saw a dermatologist they just prescribed retinol cream (the textbook solution), didn't look at my skin, and didn't much care for my thoughts or concerns about how to better care for it. "Just take the cream damnit" - a couple years later I found that the cream was just adjusting the texture of my skin, and likely overly sensitizing it. The doc didn't care and was happy to continue prescribing it. When doctors abscond their responsibility to know what they're talking about, folks have no choice but to seek it out. Many people have this experience with physicians of all stripes.
    - leesalminen 5y ago
      I just had a doctor completely mis-prescribe Azithromycin to me. They prescribed 5x the correct dose. I even asked them three times about it before leaving the appointment and they looked at me like I was crazy. Luckily my parents worked for Pfizer for a combined 80 years and confirmed my suspicions before I started taking it.
      - aidenn0 5y ago
        I had hallucinations and a manic episode due to a doctor prescribing the wrong amount of Adderall.
nereye 5y ago
You might enjoy this Guardian article on the ever-increasing efforts spent on improving grass pitches used for football: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/15/silicon-valley-of-turf-uk-perfect-football-pitch https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/15/silicon-val....
- sulZ 5y ago
  While the methods described don't seem realistic for the average residential lawn (e.g. My own), this was still entertaining. Thanks for for sharing
- dmurray 5y ago
  Fascinating article, previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521984
omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago
In my experience lawn care is mostly getting the amount of water/sun right and not beating it up too much.
- gremloni 5y ago
  Gotta have weed control or they overtake my lawn.
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    Weed control can come in many forms. Some plants do better in more acidic soil vs basic, and native grasses tend to have a range of optimal pH different from broadleaf plants. As well, cutting strategy can help via shading--if the grasses are taller than the weeds, they get more light and grow taller still and choke out the weeds from getting sun. Part of the problem with lawns in general is the ideal lawn, like the magazine lawn, tends to be a monoculture. But a really healthy, low-maintenance pasture tends to be a polyculture of many grasses, a few legumes (e.g., clover), and the occasional broadleaf (dandelions are great for instance when it comes to improving soil structure--their roots can really help aerate compacted soil).
js2 5y ago
Somewhere in your state may be a university that can give advice on what works well locally. e.g. https://www.turffiles.ncsu.edu/ https://www.turffiles.ncsu.edu/
sokoloff 5y ago
I think a lab soil test ($20 or so) and following the basics of weed control (Google “triangle weed control”) and soil amendments as guided by the test will get you a 90-95th percentile lawn without tons of agonizing effort or much expense. Add irrigation and you’ll be at 97+%-ile. The frustration I have with my lawn hobby is that it looks “great” to most visitors but I know all the flaws and where I’ve still got improvements to make.
robomartin 5y ago
> Or is it multivariate and all the parameters matter and affect and interact with each other? I've been saying this a lot lately (in different forms): Reality is not a single variable problem; it's a multivariate puzzle which is never as simple as a single cause -> effect scenario. This applies to absolutely everything these days, from growing plants to politics. In many ways this is the failure of the internet/social media. Everything tends towards simple single variable explanations that are never, ever, in alignment with reality. And yet, entire populations become divided along these simple lines. Even when talking about how to grow a lawn.
ironmagma 5y ago
My main question is, how many of these products are actually safe to be using to grow food? How many contain heavy metals or dangerous particles that just haven't been tested for?
gorgoiler 5y ago
…and when one isn’t working on one’s lawn, there are always cast iron pans that need seasoning.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
In general I think the size of the controversy tends to be inversely proportional to the size of the effect. This seems to apply to a lot of things, from how many reps you do in the gym to how you apply thermal paste to a CPU to how best to cook a steak. It's not that you can't mess these things up, but there does seem to be a rather large number of methods that work pretty well, and the difference in effect between "pretty well" and "optimal" seems overall to be small enough to allow for controversy.
- fnord123 5y ago
  This is especially true in cooking. There is like one method for macron because if you mess it up it won't work. But there are loads of debates about 'real Carbonara' because spaghetti with fatty pork (e.g. guanciale, bacon), egg, and cheese (and maybe cream depending on who you ask), maybe black pepper - you can't fail.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I think it's pretty generally applicable. If you think about it, there couldn't be a controversy if one of the options was clearly and demonstrably better than the other. Even manufactured controversies like 5G crackpots or snake oil cures seems to often revolve around these nebulous long term effects that hover like a mirage right on the precipice of what's testable, hinted at with a generous interpretation of the scientific literature, but never quite rigorously demonstrated.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      > If you think about it, there couldn't be a controversy if one of the options was clearly and demonstrably better than the other. Not that I disagree, but lots of people would argue otherwise, especially in politics.
      - marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Well political systems aren't true or false statements about the world. People can and do have different political visions. Political debates often boil down to nonsense like "The best way to apply thermal paste is with the dot method!" "No, are you an idiot, look at the facts! The way you proper way to cook a steak is with a reverse sear!"
snarfy 5y ago
I was confused by all the products also, until a family that owned a landscaping company moved in next door to me. Their yard was basically a dirt lot with no grass. A month or so later and it was a lush green landscape. It seemed like all they did was cover the yard completely with manure. After seeing their success I did the same and my yard turned green too. Was it the manure? Yes, but also no. I moved across country and manure doesn't work like it used to. It was really the expert knowledge that did it.
treeman79 5y ago
Followed a bunch of advise. Ended up with a yard of mud for a month. Was the eye sore of the neighborhood. Then it exploded. Lush beautiful grass that would not stop. Had to mow it 2-3 times a week until winter.
akeck 5y ago
All our neighbors use lawn companies and apply fertilizer and pesticides constantly. They don't have soil anymore. It's mid to light brown dirt. At some point, we watched a video of a Gabe Brown presentation (author of From Dirt to Soil). Our new, hold-my-beer, "game" is to do as little as possible to our lawn - other than keeping it long - while still having it greener than everyone else. One factor that turns out to be critical is encouraging clover. Clover apparently fixes nitrogen, so a good grass/clover mix can be remarkably low maintenance.
rdtwo 5y ago
If you find some good resources can you post them/links. It’s so hard to find good informative websites that I can burn days scouring the internet for decent repositorys.

colechristensen 5y ago

This is a problem all over, from health advice to cooking to skincare, lawn care, etc. etc. etc. A complex system with many variables and optimum points trying to be solved with anecdotes, magical cures, and "good for you" products.

eru 5y ago
A good place to study human confirmation bias.
Larrikin 5y ago
Atleast with cooking I've collected a few sources that are consistently good. For new recipes I follow them exactly the first time and disregard any source that has had more than a couple not great recipes, specifically any recipe on all recipes that not a sponsored professional chef.
- tompazourek 5y ago
  When cooking, we often optimize for flavor and texture. But what about digestion and nutrition and how each person has different preferences and a different body? It starts getting very complicated quite fast, so many variables...
- quietbritishjim 5y ago
  The parent comment's point is not that there is no good cooking advice out there, but instead that there are enough variables that it can't be taken at face value. I've used a recipe that have worked very well for me but then gave radically different results when I used a different casserole dish. I managed to fix it by taking the lid off later in the process and adjusting the oven temperature by 30°C. Not many recipes mention that amount of temperature variation depending on what cooking equipment you're using.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  (for cooking, but also others) There usually are good sources and they fall under two categories (or both): very precise procedure which was actually tested or technique and feedback focused information. The latter being far more important. How to adjust, signs to look for (sound, smell, taste, sight), the proper uses of tools, etc. "This is how I do it!" blog kinds of recipes usually suffer from hidden techniques or undocumented variables where you try it yourself and it's just awful. In other words, good advice involves science and art, not just one-off reports of success.
  - jamincan 5y ago
    The problem, of course, is that advice focusing on technique and feedback is a lot harder to pass on, and a lot harder to absorb. It's the difference between a 30 second tik tok clip and a one hour in-depth on par-baking pie crusts.
mabub24 5y ago
For a lot of these things, the steps to finding something that works should start with seeing someone who is a specialist of some sort, and, if at all possible, getting them to actually look at whatever you need help for. For skincare, see a dermatologist. Anyone with skincare issues or concerns, PLEASE just see a dermatologist. They might not tell you what you want to hear, but they can usually give you a good baseline description and diagnosis of what to work on. That's 99% of the battle. For lawn care, try to talk to a lawn care specialist, hopefully someone who is not trying to sell you something. Golf courses usually have 1 or 2 people that know a lot about grass. Even someone that you think has a really good lawn, ask them to come over and take a look at yours. Getting advice off the internet is helpful, but I've usually found it to not beat getting someone in person who can actually look at what ever the thing is you're looking for advice for.
- aspaceman 5y ago
  This is funny because when I saw a dermatologist they just prescribed retinol cream (the textbook solution), didn't look at my skin, and didn't much care for my thoughts or concerns about how to better care for it. "Just take the cream damnit" - a couple years later I found that the cream was just adjusting the texture of my skin, and likely overly sensitizing it. The doc didn't care and was happy to continue prescribing it. When doctors abscond their responsibility to know what they're talking about, folks have no choice but to seek it out. Many people have this experience with physicians of all stripes.
  - leesalminen 5y ago
    I just had a doctor completely mis-prescribe Azithromycin to me. They prescribed 5x the correct dose. I even asked them three times about it before leaving the appointment and they looked at me like I was crazy. Luckily my parents worked for Pfizer for a combined 80 years and confirmed my suspicions before I started taking it.
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      I had hallucinations and a manic episode due to a doctor prescribing the wrong amount of Adderall.

nereye 5y ago

You might enjoy this Guardian article on the ever-increasing efforts spent on improving grass pitches used for football: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/15/silicon-valley-of-turf-uk-perfect-football-pitch https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/15/silicon-val....

sulZ 5y ago
While the methods described don't seem realistic for the average residential lawn (e.g. My own), this was still entertaining. Thanks for for sharing
dmurray 5y ago
Fascinating article, previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521984

omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago

In my experience lawn care is mostly getting the amount of water/sun right and not beating it up too much.

gremloni 5y ago
Gotta have weed control or they overtake my lawn.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  Weed control can come in many forms. Some plants do better in more acidic soil vs basic, and native grasses tend to have a range of optimal pH different from broadleaf plants. As well, cutting strategy can help via shading--if the grasses are taller than the weeds, they get more light and grow taller still and choke out the weeds from getting sun. Part of the problem with lawns in general is the ideal lawn, like the magazine lawn, tends to be a monoculture. But a really healthy, low-maintenance pasture tends to be a polyculture of many grasses, a few legumes (e.g., clover), and the occasional broadleaf (dandelions are great for instance when it comes to improving soil structure--their roots can really help aerate compacted soil).

js2 5y ago

Somewhere in your state may be a university that can give advice on what works well locally. e.g. https://www.turffiles.ncsu.edu/ https://www.turffiles.ncsu.edu/

sokoloff 5y ago

I think a lab soil test ($20 or so) and following the basics of weed control (Google “triangle weed control”) and soil amendments as guided by the test will get you a 90-95th percentile lawn without tons of agonizing effort or much expense. Add irrigation and you’ll be at 97+%-ile. The frustration I have with my lawn hobby is that it looks “great” to most visitors but I know all the flaws and where I’ve still got improvements to make.

robomartin 5y ago

> Or is it multivariate and all the parameters matter and affect and interact with each other? I've been saying this a lot lately (in different forms): Reality is not a single variable problem; it's a multivariate puzzle which is never as simple as a single cause -> effect scenario. This applies to absolutely everything these days, from growing plants to politics. In many ways this is the failure of the internet/social media. Everything tends towards simple single variable explanations that are never, ever, in alignment with reality. And yet, entire populations become divided along these simple lines. Even when talking about how to grow a lawn.

ironmagma 5y ago

My main question is, how many of these products are actually safe to be using to grow food? How many contain heavy metals or dangerous particles that just haven't been tested for?

gorgoiler 5y ago

…and when one isn’t working on one’s lawn, there are always cast iron pans that need seasoning.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

In general I think the size of the controversy tends to be inversely proportional to the size of the effect. This seems to apply to a lot of things, from how many reps you do in the gym to how you apply thermal paste to a CPU to how best to cook a steak. It's not that you can't mess these things up, but there does seem to be a rather large number of methods that work pretty well, and the difference in effect between "pretty well" and "optimal" seems overall to be small enough to allow for controversy.

fnord123 5y ago
This is especially true in cooking. There is like one method for macron because if you mess it up it won't work. But there are loads of debates about 'real Carbonara' because spaghetti with fatty pork (e.g. guanciale, bacon), egg, and cheese (and maybe cream depending on who you ask), maybe black pepper - you can't fail.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I think it's pretty generally applicable. If you think about it, there couldn't be a controversy if one of the options was clearly and demonstrably better than the other. Even manufactured controversies like 5G crackpots or snake oil cures seems to often revolve around these nebulous long term effects that hover like a mirage right on the precipice of what's testable, hinted at with a generous interpretation of the scientific literature, but never quite rigorously demonstrated.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > If you think about it, there couldn't be a controversy if one of the options was clearly and demonstrably better than the other. Not that I disagree, but lots of people would argue otherwise, especially in politics.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Well political systems aren't true or false statements about the world. People can and do have different political visions. Political debates often boil down to nonsense like "The best way to apply thermal paste is with the dot method!" "No, are you an idiot, look at the facts! The way you proper way to cook a steak is with a reverse sear!"

snarfy 5y ago

I was confused by all the products also, until a family that owned a landscaping company moved in next door to me. Their yard was basically a dirt lot with no grass. A month or so later and it was a lush green landscape. It seemed like all they did was cover the yard completely with manure. After seeing their success I did the same and my yard turned green too. Was it the manure? Yes, but also no. I moved across country and manure doesn't work like it used to. It was really the expert knowledge that did it.

treeman79 5y ago

Followed a bunch of advise. Ended up with a yard of mud for a month. Was the eye sore of the neighborhood. Then it exploded. Lush beautiful grass that would not stop. Had to mow it 2-3 times a week until winter.

akeck 5y ago

All our neighbors use lawn companies and apply fertilizer and pesticides constantly. They don't have soil anymore. It's mid to light brown dirt. At some point, we watched a video of a Gabe Brown presentation (author of From Dirt to Soil). Our new, hold-my-beer, "game" is to do as little as possible to our lawn - other than keeping it long - while still having it greener than everyone else. One factor that turns out to be critical is encouraging clover. Clover apparently fixes nitrogen, so a good grass/clover mix can be remarkably low maintenance.

rdtwo 5y ago

If you find some good resources can you post them/links. It’s so hard to find good informative websites that I can burn days scouring the internet for decent repositorys.