The P-Tumati Distribution

Author: Pavan

  • Plug Progress: Keepin’ it Reel

    It turned out that the reason there was so much devastation in my lawn is because the time slots that were programmed into my irrigation controller coincided with low municipal water supply pressure. The system was programmed to fire at 3:30 a.m. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, so I placed little water collectors over the lawn to analyze the distribution of water:

    The Real Killer:

    When the boxes weren’t registering with water and there were soggy spots, I realized what had happened: the pooling zones contributed to fungus before the temps warmed up. The fungus weakened my St. Augustine and opened me up to weeds and Bermuda. My short cutting of the lawn didn’t help; however, had the irrigation been fine, I’d likely have been fine. I’ve halted mowing until I have an adequate green up, and then I’ll manually trim the height to the recommended 3-4″.

    It became much easier for me to manage the diagnosis of these problems after I installed a Wi-Fi unit into my irrigation controller and started observing behavior by triggering the app and zones as needed.

    The Real Kyllinga:

    The wet pooling zones contributed to another problem — kyllinga. I had the yard sprayed with Dismiss to blow away the sedge and the kyllinga. I have unsightly brown spots with dead kyllinga, although it looks like I need to hit the yard again in a few weeks to really manage this infestation.

    Plug Progress:

    Two weeks ago, I dropped plugs on the area where the sedge and kyllinga died off. The original photo was on or around April 7th. On April 21st, I am seeing extremely healthy plugs with very beautiful green growth. The eastern end of the plug patch is seemingly filling in. I did not hit this area with Dismiss; I’m just going to deal with the remaining weeds after the grass gets a stronger foothold.

    One thing about lawn issues is that the “debug cycle” to diagnose real problems is much longer than for diagnosing problems in something like software. The process of being forced to understand the process is helping me develop a real skill: being patient.

    Here’s a current photo of the progress below. (You can even see the dead kyllinga at the bottom.) The plugs themselves have greened up quite a bit — I’m just waiting for the runners to take off.

  • Plug’n Play

    This past week I realized the reason the verticut on the St. Augustine grass went poorly is because my irrigation system is broken. I’m waiting for irrigation repairs. (I tried tinkering with Bermuda plugs, but because of irrigation issues, most of my Bermuda plugs didn’t come out looking so hot. I’m toying with the idea of creating an isolated Bermuda zone to alpha-test the idea of converting to Bermuda grass.) In the meantime, I’m coming to terms with the sheer amount of turf-grass madness going on in my lawn.

    Last season, I had a professional come by and spray herbicide, not fully comprehending how weedy the lawn I acquired actually was. The professional basically said the nutsedge would sort of wilt away, but the remaining grass would stay somewhat healthy. What he didn’t explain was that where there were large pockets of sedge grass, I’d have a giant barren spot that would subject me to erosion and other dilemmas. I happened to have multiple spots like this.

    I’m just going to come out and say it: I can’t stand nutsedge. It’s only April, and this menace is everywhere. I power raked and tore up the dead zone where the previous nutsedge was and dropped plugs. It took some time and a lot of rewinding and replaying videos from people who seemed competent on YouTube:

    St. Augustine plugs (before pouring on compost and leveling sand)

    I have no idea whether this will work as I am a novice, but I enjoyed sweating in the hot Florida sun. It was a nice break from the sorts of problems I encounter on weekdays.

  • Bermuda Growth Rates

    Continuing the life of a grass-blundering fool, I’m still committed to the slow expansion of Bermuda grass, even though I’ve plugged parts of my lawn with St. Augustine where things have gone bad.

    You’re not supposed to seed a Bermuda lawn because of color mismatch — or so I am told on the lawn care forums. The patch growing on the west side of my lawn has this deep, dark emerald color that I wish I could match. But, just to test the theory out on seed coloration, I bought two random bags of grass and put the seeds on both sides of the pot:


    Supposedly, the Pennington “Smart Seed” variety was supposed to grow at 2x the rate. The seeds themselves were a different shape and color than the seeds from the Scott’s bag. Below in the photograph, I put the Pennington on the left of the pot and then the Scott’s on the right side of the pot. (The pot just has some potting soil in it, but I don’t think this affected the result too much.)

    Sure enough, around 2.5 weeks out, the Pennington grass is growing much much more quickly. The Scott’s grass is there if you look close enough.

    More importantly, though, the coloration on this grass is nowhere near the deep dark emerald color that I have growing on the lawn now. The forums are correct about seeds. I plan to transplant some of these seeds into an isolated zone to tinker with the fertilization parameters in different areas and test out different shade levels. Let’s see how that goes.

  • auto *presence = new DigitalPresence();

    I’d been submitting patches in anonymity for a while to various open source projects without commenting too much.  I was content to be a passive participant, but over time I’ve come to realize that technology and research projects are fundamentally social activities.  Not being part of the give-and-take in the community means missing out on a lot of meaningful interactions (including the occasionally necessary heated debates and flames) with other intelligent developers.  Moreover, with the presence of services like github which encourage “social coding”, it became harder not to pulled into the mix.

    Technology is great, but love for it tends to be nurtured by the often interesting, diverse, and dedicated people who take part it its creation — these are the people I am ultimately thankful to and whose efforts I am thankful for.  I didn’t want to start writing anything technical before giving any sort of credit to the people who’ve assisted me along the way.

    With that having been said …. First post!

    -Pavan Tumati