If you can't beat them, join them.

I actually loathe this catch phrase. Recently though, I found one scenario where I am eagerly waiting to "join them". "Them" being those clover weeds.

I spent a combined five hours last weekend attempting to remove White Dutch Clover by hand from my small front lawn. By the end of the weekend my back hurt and despite the two full garbage bags of clover, my hard labor hardly made a dent in the yard. So, off to Google I went in search of "Safe, Organic ways to kill clover" and I stumbled upon this interesting conversation on ivillage. After reading though several comments, I came across a post by annaneaves. Which I can sum up as the most brilliant thing I've read on lawn care. Why not just leave the clover alone? annaneaves goes on to say that her lawn looks better than her turf-only neighbor and that the key is an even mixture of grass and clover. She even posted a picture of her super green lawn which can be seen here.


Clover & Grass Lawn

(Green T)

Now that I had the idea I was off in search of more information on how to do this. I got the picture above from a blog post on Green T Environmental Awareness titled Overseeding with clover. From this post I learned how easy it is to care for a clover lawn and that the clover actually feeds the lawn with additional nitrogen. As an added bonus, clover typically remains green year around. I highly recommend jumping over there to read more.

I still plan to thin out my current big clumps of clover, but I now would like to add clover to other parts of my lawn to get the even look. I can't wait to see how it turns out!