Fairy rings drive some lawn owners crazy. (University of Minnesota photo)

Mother Nature rarely offers up a mystery any more intriguing than the phenomenon known as fairy ring. One can only imagine what our ancestors must have conjured up as the reason for giant circles that seem to appear from nowhere in the middle of stands of grass in the summer.

At a recent consulting job in Maryland, the groundskeepers were perplexed about whether or not to take action. Their rings were more half moons, that presented as about a 20-foot arc of dark green grass. At another area of the property, the fairy rings appeared as a giant, almost perfect, circle of mushrooms.

In some cases fairy rings can be quite unsightly, but in most cases they’re a minor nuisance. In virtually all cases, the best advice is to leave well enough alone. They will eventually grow out and die off.

WHAT ARE THEY?

Fairy rings are a result of Saprophytic fungi that degrade organic matter, most often accumulated thatch, in lawns that have been treated with excessive fertilizers in an irrigated lawn. As the fungi grow in an outward direction, the leading edge of the fungi produces dark green grass because of all the nutrients that are being consumed and released by the fungi. That dark green color produces the visible fairy ring that, through the years, can become quite large.

One interesting note to me is that the mere existence of fairy rings is advertisement number one for how microscopic organisms like fungi process nutrients and allow grass to grow dark and green. All we’re doing in organic lawn care is trying to enhance that process. The only reason fairy rings are even a problem for some folks is that the fungi are working TOO well and therefore creating an unbalanced appearance in some areas of the lawn.

But I digress.

Some people have the urge to dig out the soil in the area of the fairy ring and start over. But with all the time and effort that would take — not to mention how bad the area would look before the new grass took hold and blended in with the existing lawn — you should avoid that urge. Fungicides rarely work, either, and the chemical ones are toxic as heck.

In general, don’t overwater and overfertilize your lawn and you won’t have a problem. If fairy rings do appear, aerate the ring to allow water to penetrate the heavy fungal layer. You can also apply a surfactant (or wetting agent) to the area to increase water flow. Here’s a link to a good one: http://www.poulengerusa.com/ called SeaSafe. Allow the grass to grow tall during the appearance of the fairy ring to mask it from the surrounding area.

If you do get a fairy ring in a lawn that is otherwise pale green, one strategy is to take a soil test of the surrounding area so that you can fertilize and adjust the pH as necessary to maximize the green color of the overall lawn. That, too, will mask the fairy ring problem.

One final note about the mushrooms that accompany fairy ring: if you have children, rake up the mushrooms. As a father of a 1-year-old, I know how everything winds up in her mouth. Unless your an expert on edible fungi, then ASSUME the mushrooms are poisonous and get rid of them.

Here’s a good fact sheet from Cornell on fairy ring: http://plantclinic.cornell.edu/FactSheets/fairyring/fairyring.htm.

Aaron Robbs (from the RISE web site)

The lawn and garden pesticide industry will soon have a new front man to claim its products are safe. Aaron Hobbs is slated to replace Allen James as the head of the propaganda organization known as The Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment effective tomorrow, Sept. 1.

Announced in a press release published today by the trade journal Lawn & Landscape magazine, Hobbs appeared to be well versed in swaying the opinion of elected officials while he served as director of the National Assembly of Sportsmen’s Caucuses for the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, an organization that prides itself in identifying politicians who are sympathetic to its cause. According to the press release, Hobbs has also served in past positions as an international trade economist and presidential management fellow with the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Foreign Agriculture Service, and as a resource economist with USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service.

The chemical fertilizer and pesticide industry is clearly hoping that Hobbs can reverse an overwhelming tide of legislative and public relations losses that occurred on James’ watch. James, who ran a college fraternity organization and a sanitary supply group prior to 1991, has been the only leader in the 20-year-history of RISE, which is supported by manufacturers and distributors of fertilizers, weed killers, insecticides and fungicides among other toxic substances — many of which are now banned in Canada and at the municipal level in various communities in the U.S.

James sounded defeated, yet defiant, in his final keynote address at the annual RISE meeting.

“We have reached the tipping point with respect to activism targeting our industry, emboldened by Presidential and Congressional leadership favorable to their views,” he said. “They call our scientific basis into question.”

To James, a proper man who was rarely seen in public without a suit and tie, any of us who questioned the safety of lawn and garden pesticides were un-American.

“There is a tremendous divide between the beliefs of the majority of our nation and the voice of the few well-funded activist/detractors of our industry and critics of our standard of living,” he said. “The activists opposing our industry are one-and-the-same as those opposing the progress of our great nation. That point we need to understand clearly. And, if we do not stand firmly against these groups, we will surely be torn apart by them.”

It’s somewhat remarkable to me that in 17 years as an outspoken activist, I’ve never had an actual conversation with James. He wrote to me on at least three occasions while I served as Editor of People, Places & Plants magazine, each time taking me to task for my pro-organic and anti-pesticide positions. I knew for certain that I was getting under his skin when he appeared in person at our SafeLawns.org kickoff rally on the Washington Mall on April 4, 2007. How did I know? He immediately went back to his office and issued this press release that is still parked three and a half years later on the RISE web site: http://pestfacts.org/media/newsheadlines/dynamic.aspx?pageID=4&contentID=18.

In that release he rather infamously equated the arrival of spring with the availability of pesticides, as if one wouldn’t happen without the other. Appearing as dour as he was dapper, his cameo at the rally made him literally the classic villain in the film, A Chemical Reaction.

“Allen believes what he believes and he will never, ever change his mind,” said his arch nemesis, Jay Feldman, who has debated James on numerous occasions as the head of Beyond Pesticides. “Whether he believes it because he’s paid to believe it, or because he really believes it, you were never going to change Allen James’s mind or get him to admit that pesticides were dangerous.”

I won’t ever forget the two men going head to head on CNN in 2003 when the original West Nile virus scare was breaking nationally. To Allen James, only one solution existed: “The only way to reduce adult mosquitoes is to use adulticide insecticides.”

When Jay pointed out that those pesticides “are chemicals that have been linked to cancer, birth defects, neurological conditions, respiratory effects,” Allen James called him a liar right there on the air.

It was a classic case for agnotologists to study years from now. As we discussed in our Monday blog, agnotology studies the manufacturing of doubt. By calling Jay Feldman a liar in that moment, and sounding convincing in the process, Allen James had created the doubt he was looking for — and probably won the debate despite Jay being the more informed, accurate and reasonable man.

It’s tempting to celebrate James’s departure as a victory. Though the chemical industry now has an award in his name, and it’s trotting out all sorts of tributes about how he persevered against all odds, James is clearly leaving office utterly defeated. The truth is he spent tens of millions of dollars to convince people to spread as many poisons as possible on their lawns, and yet his industry lost an entire nation of Canada and will eventually lose this one, too.

But as Dr. June Irwin predicted in our film, A Chemical Reaction, the chemical industry will never, ever give up. They’ve trotted out a new, younger villain. This one doesn’t wear a suit quite as well, but reportedly works a congressional caucus like nobody’s business. Aaron Hobbs has vastly more experience as a lobbyist as he takes this job than James probably ever acquired and he’ll hit the ground running tomorrow with an energy that can never be dismissed.

He is, in other words, going to be a formidable opponent. When you wake up tomorrow, you need to renew your resolve to spread the word about the organic alternatives.

Considered to be one of the “greenest places to live in America” by numerous publications, the city of Boulder appears poised to live up to its reputation with garden to lawn care.

“It’s exciting out there, it really is,” said nationally recognized organic turf expert Chip Osborne of Osborne Organics of Marblehead, Mass., after his recent visit as a consultant to the city of about 90,000.

In September, I’ll be heading out as a guest of EcoLogical Lawn Care, the newest SafeLawns Approved organic lawn care company — the first from Colorado. The date is Sept. 23 at 6 p.m., although venue details are still being finalized.

“The desire is out here, but we customers still need to understand the process,” said John DiFilippi, who launched into organic lawn care after concerns about safety issues associated with traditional chemical treatments.

If you’re interested in bringing the message of SafeLawns to your community, email Paul@SafeLawns.org. For information about the Boulder event, email: john@ecologicallawncare.com.

Bans of phosphorus in lawn fertilizer have become hugely controversial across the United States in the past four years. Opponents of the bans say that the major sources of phosphorus in lakes, rivers and streams do not come from lawns, but rather from leaves, pollen, agricultural runoff and housing developments among others.

Phosphorus in fresh water bodies is of major concern because the nutrient encourages blooms of algae, which sucks up oxygen and other resources and makes life otherwise difficult for marine life.

Professor John Lehman, who had been studying nutrient concentrations in Huron River for several years prior to the city of Ann Arbor enacting a phosphorus ban in fertilizers in 2007, issued a landmark study a year ago that gave the nation its first true data points about whether or not bans of phosphorus in lawn fertilizer affect runoff into bodies of water. Because he held the data prior to the ban, he was in a unique position to conduct the study.

Although the third-year numbers have not been published, he told us: “Year 3 results (2010) to date remain consistent with the hypothesis that river phosphorus is lower in the part of the catchment affected by the ban.”

In a report that Lehman submitted to the city of Ann Arbor, obtained by SafeLawns, he concluded that at the control site of his experiment — upstream from the phosphorus ban — no reduction in phosphorus was seen in the water. That led to the conclusion that the reduction in phosphorus levels in the area impacted by the ban was due to the legislation.

Several media outlets in New York and New Jersey have contacted us in the past month since legislation in both of those states has addressed the phosphorus issue. Based on Lehman’s ongoing three-year study, a phosphorus reduction in lawn fertilizers does appear to be justified.

That would leave two primary questions: 1) What will be the impact on the lack of phosphorus in lawn fertilizers on the health of lawns?; and 2) Should that matter either way? One could easily argue that the health of a lake or river is far more important than the collective health of lawns.

Opponents of the no-phosphorus bills will argue that phosphorus is necessary for lawns to be healthy and that is true. They’ll also point out that a lush lawn reduces soil erosion and therefore keeps phosphorus out of water, which is also true.

But the reality is that lawns are not likely to die outright if phosphorus is taken out of the fertilizers. If data shows, down the road, that the impact on overall lawn health is unreasonable, then perhaps a compromise can be struck that allows some small percentage of phosphorus to be added back into the bags.

In the meantime, we need to rely on the science and stand in favor of reasonable phosphorus restrictions.

Now, one might ask at first blush: Why on earth would anyone want to study that? In this age of enlightenment, of the Internet, there ought to be oodles of real knowledge everywhere. And yet, as the universe’s leading expert on the subject has pointed out, “the conscious creation of ignorance is rampant.”

Stanford University scholar Dr. Robert N. Proctor even wrote a book about his word: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?book_id=5652%205901 and I ordered it today. The chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology and racial ignorance. The primary focus of Proctor’s work, however, has been to call out the cigarette industry for its decades of misleading information.

The manufacturers and marketers of your grandfather’s Marlboros, as is now so widely known, consciously conspired to conceal information from the masses so that they’d keep lighting up. Today, even though some folks know butts are bad for them, they still smoke. Companies are allowed to make them and sell them and, well, it’s anyone’s right to increase their risk of lung cancer if they want to, right?

Though I’ve not yet had time to study this, I’m sure that agnotologists have unearthed myriad recurring patterns, or tactics, whether you’re talking about cigarettes, or lead in paints, or climate change and, to be sure, lawn chemicals. The folks agnotology would really appear to be studying are the lobbyists who are paid to change public opinion in a facts-be-damned recklessness that leaves planetary and human health in its wake.

None of this is new, of course. Politicians and preachers have been leveraging doubt to sway public opinion since the beginning of time. Whenever something can’t be explained empirically — and it so rarely can — it leaves an opening for ignorance to creep in. In that case, a made-up answer is every bit as valid as the truth in most people’s minds. Just deliver the load of bull with confidence and you’re likely to find a receptive audience.

And I’m not sure why the discovery of this word is so exciting. Applying a name to the study of corporate deception won’t stop the lies, after all.

But I, for one, would prefer to believe in collective and collected human intelligence. Perhaps agnotologists will one day be able to make the successful case that second-hand cigarette smoke wafting through a room is fundamentally no different than second-hand lawn chemicals drifting through a neighborhood, or that the people now denouncing global warming came from ancestors who thought dumping open sewage into lakes and rivers was just fine.

Maybe, just maybe, we’ll wake up before it’s too late. We need to at least hope.

That’s why the study out of the University of Michigan last week set the Internet abuzz. Titled “Ecological Complexity and Pest Control in Organic Coffee Production: Uncovering an Autonomous Ecosystem Service,” the study went a long way toward explaining why organic systems really are more disease free. The study was published in the journal BioScience and reported broadly at BeyondPesticides.org and elsewhere, including this piece: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100826122620.htm

Thanks, Annie!

With ambient temperatures on the rise across the U.S. this season, almost everything in the plant world is early. Plants bloomed ahead of schedule, insect infestations ignored the calendar and, now, weed seeds that usually come at the end of the year are beginning to creep into lawns early.

That makes it time to trot out the common sense message: IF YOU DON’T WANT MORE OF THE SAME WEEDS NEXT SEASON, GET RID OF THIS YEAR’S SEEDS.

I’m not a fan of bagging mowers. It’s a much better idea to return the clippings to the lawn, where they quickly biodegrade and provide nutrients and valuable organic matter. In September and October, though, a bag attachment can make quick work of collecting the seeds from plantain, crabgrass, goosegrass and scores of other weeds that send up seeds in the fall.

Of course, these can also be dug out by hand or spot sprayed with a non-selective organic weed killer. But for large lawns, the bag is the most practical solution.

One Important Note: Once you have collected the weeds and seeds, don’t add these to the compost pile unless you’re a master composter who can routinely guarantee temperatures of 130-150 degrees in the pile. Instead, take the weeds and seeds way out into the woods where they won’t germinate or place them in a biodegradable bag where they’ll be recycled at the municipal transfer station.