Lawn Care For Dummies

I didn't have a clue about landscape but had to learn really fast when I bought my house. This book has been my bible. It's great!

I planted my first lawn from scratch this Spring, and spent a lot of time reading and re-reading this book. The advice the book gave was great, particularly when it came to selecting the type of grass to plant for my particular needs and in my area.The other reviewers are correct about the photos being not very useful, but they certainly are pretty! However, I found the author's descriptions of grass types to be very clear and putting pictures of grass types would have been redundant.There were a few things that could have used more coverage, though. In particular, the description of the various options in boundaries and edgings was difficult to follow with very few pictures. Plus, the section on sprinklers touched on only about half of the types of sprinklers offered by my local garden center. My neighbor across the street planted his lawn at the same time I did mine, but without the book. He's a nice guy, but his lawn is a joke! Maybe I'll loan him my book this Fall when he starts over....

This book is an excellent reference on everything you would want to know on how to start, repair or maintain a lawn, but it doesn't answer some really, really basic questions, like "What kind of grass do I have?" The photos are just fluff, and could have been better used to identify grass types, weeds or lawn problems.

Having never had a lawn before, I needed a very basic, gentle introduction to what it means to have and care for a lawn - and this book delivers just that. It also covers topics I might not have thought about ahead of time, including lawn disease and alternate ground covers. The ambient sense of humor makes what could appear to be a very intimidating project seem more like fun than work. My only objection - the color photos are wasted on shots of random lawns. I would have preferred to see these photos used to show examples that are best viewed, rather than textually described... such as grass types, insect & disease damage, weeds, etc. Overall, this book has given me a great overview of my entire lawn project, and I can't wait to get started.