Q. How do I restore my lawn once it has been taken over by weeds, such as crabgrass and grubs and the soil has become well-packed and cracked?

A. First, you will need to decide whether to tackle this yourself of hire a professional lawn care company. This will be a fair bit of work to restore your lawn. You may want to consider lawn alternatives instead - ground covers, low maintenance shrubs, drought resistant perennials, pea gravel, stones, etc.

To restore a lawn that it is completely gone, we suggest:

• Consider the addition of top soil to improve the depth and quality of soil.
• Re-seed with a grass mixture that includes perennial rye grass - it is both drought resistant and grubs do not like to feed on it.
• If you hire a company to re-sod, ask if the sod contains perennial rye grass. There is no point re-sodding with 100% Kentucky blue grass.

Crab grass is an annual grass, so if you had it last year, your lawn will have crab grass seeds waiting to germinate this spring. You can buy Corn Gluten Meal Fertilizer from a nursery or good garden store. If you apply it in May, it will prevent the crab grass seed from germinating. It also prevents all other grass seed from germinating, so if you re-seed your lawn, you must wait at least 3 weeks before applying corn gluten meal.

Grubs, like all insects, have cycles where they are plentiful and when they are not. To measure whether or not you have grub problem, simply lift a one square foot section of sod with a spade. If more than 5 - 10 larvae are present, then you have a problem. You can spray grubs with a nematode spray in July - August. I would hire a lawn care company to do that for you.

MG