Lawn care and pest control in Columbia City

Columbia City is a clay-till town. About half of the city sits on Blount, Glynwood and Morley loams, laid down on interlobate moraine, and another nine percent is Pewamo silty clay loam in the low ground, which the USDA rates as very poorly drained and hydric. If your yard holds water into May and dries into a cracked crust by August, that is the ground telling you what it is.

The topsoil is not the trouble. The first eight inches passes water at a reasonable clip and carries about a quarter clay, which is enough to feed a lawn well. Then the profile changes. The layer starting at eight inches carries around forty percent clay and passes water at roughly a tenth of the rate the topsoil does. That is a tenfold drop, from a horizon roots want to be in to a horizon they cannot get through. Three feet down there is a densic layer that roots do not enter at all.

On much of the town's dominant ground the seasonal water table sits about nine inches below the surface from November through May. That is a perched water table, water stopped by the layer it cannot move through, and it is the reason so many Columbia City lawns feel spongy in the spring, thin out in July, and never quite recover in the fall. Rain has no downward exit until the profile drains sideways or evaporates.

That is the plain-language case for aeration over another round of fertilizer, and it is a measurement rather than an opinion. Pulling cores opens that eight-inch boundary so water, air and nutrients get past it, and roots have somewhere to go. Fertilizer dropped on ground that will not breathe is money sitting on top of a lid.

The Morley on the steeper slopes off the moraine has its own trouble. Where it has eroded, the surface is already clay loam rather than loam, and its topsoil passes water at about a third of what an uneroded Morley does. Those are the yards that shed a summer storm across the drive instead of taking it in.

Columbia City runs its own yard programs, and once you look at them together they add up to a city that pays attention.

The grass and rank vegetation limit is tighter than Warsaw's nine inches, at eight. A well-fed, dense lawn on a normal mowing week never gets close to that, but a vacant lot or a property between tenants can trip it fast. If you are getting notices, the fix is turf healthy enough to compete rather than a bigger mower.

Leaf pickup is loose rather than bagged, which is worth knowing if you have moved here from a town that bags. Rake to the curb in the fall, and in early spring the city turns those leaves into free mulch and hands it out on a first come basis. It is a small thing and it is a good one, because it puts organic matter back into ground that is not overrun with it. Limb and brush pickup runs one week a month, April through October, out by seven on the Monday of pickup week.

The best of the bunch is the mosquito program. The city puts larvicide briquettes into catch basins and retention ponds through spring and summer, and, unusually, sells the same briquettes to residents at the Utility Office for a dollar each. What it will not do, and what any honest program cannot claim, is touch the adult mosquitoes resting in a homeowner's own shrub line at dusk. A briquette in a catch basin two blocks away has nothing to say about the back yard, which is what a treatment on the property is for.