Lawn care and pest control in southwest Fort Wayne

Aboite Township is unusual, and the way you know is that the USDA has given up trying to map a third of it. Out of 21,249 acres in the township, 6,354 acres, about 30 percent, carry Urban land complex in the soil map unit name. That is the soil survey's own way of saying construction changed the ground enough that Blount, Glynwood and Pewamo no longer behave like Blount, Glynwood and Pewamo. Columbia City, on the same soil series, has zero Urban land map units. Same clay till underneath, entirely different story on top.

What is underneath, when you get past what the bulldozers moved around, is Blount and Glynwood till, the same profile that gives Columbia City its wet-footed reputation. Clay runs 23 percent at the surface and 42 percent eight inches down. The rate water passes through the soil drops tenfold across that same boundary, from about 9.2 micrometres per second in the topsoil to 0.92 in the layer right beneath it. A densic layer at roughly three feet stops roots outright, and a perched water table sits at about nine inches from November through May.

Then in the low ground of the township, another 4.8 percent is Pewamo silty clay loam, rated hydric and very poorly drained. Aboite Creek runs through the township, and another 7 percent of the ground is Eel silt loam on the frequently flooded bottom along the creek.

Put the two together and you have the heaviest, most worked-over ground we treat. Warsaw's sand loses water and nutrients too fast. Aboite cannot move water down past eight inches, and then a builder compacted ground that was already hard to get water into. That is why core aeration leads the service list on this page, and why another bag of fertilizer is not the answer to a lawn that has been fed for years without improving.

The housing numbers tell you when Aboite got worked over. In ZIP 46814, about 91 percent of homes are owner-occupied, the median build year is 2003, and about 59 percent of all housing went up in 2000 or later. Aboite Township as a whole grew from about 28,000 people in 2000 to more than 42,000 in 2020. That is a lot of construction on ground that was already Blount clay till.

Here is what construction does to that ground. The topsoil comes off. The subsoil gets graded and compacted by the equipment doing the grading. Sod goes down on top of what is now, effectively, a driveway with a haircut.

The fix is not a fresh bag of fertilizer. It is aeration, drainage and organic matter, in that order. Pulling cores gives water and roots a way past the compacted layer. Overseeding into those open cores builds density from scratch on ground that never had it. Feeding on top of that finally has somewhere to go.

Two more things worth knowing. Allen County's own stormwater materials tell homeowners in writing to use a phosphorus-free fertilizer and to sweep clippings back off the drive after mowing. That is not a green claim from us, it is a request from the county the customer lives in, and we already run phosphorus-free unless a soil test says otherwise. And mosquito control here is the Allen County Department of Health, not the City of Fort Wayne. The county runs a public program on permanent breeding sites but states outright that it does not spray private residential yards, which is where we come in.