Weed 'Em & Reap

The U.S. has a whole catalogue of gifts bestowed on it by the Old World--the horse, borsch, Rudolf Bing, pizza, trial by jury, Pfannkuchen, the English sparrow and crab grass. Most arrived more or less by acceptable means, but the suburban affliction defined as "a grass with creeping or decumbent stems which root freely at the nodes" sneaked in. How it made the trip is a mystery. Perhaps, many years ago, it stole out of some Portuguese garden into the sea, and, just following its nodes, crept along the ocean floor like a living cable till it reached The Bronx. Not satisfied there, it moved on to plague the rest of the nation. This week Suburbia is again on Green Alert as the warming land sends crab grass busting out.

Germination has already begun in parts of the South, is relentlessly moving northward (see map). The great, hopeful new weapon against the enemy is the "pre-emergence" killer, but the big question for the thousands who doused their lawns with the new chemicals is: Will they work? Five companies this year are marketing such products, most of them priced between $9 and $10 for a package covering about 2,500 sq. ft.: Scott's Halts, Dow's Crab Grass Killer, Vaughan's Pre-Kill, Pax's Crabgrass and Soil Pest Control, Swift's Rid; others, presumably with names like Stomp, Unconditional Surrender and Don't, are on the way.

Explosion. From all the evidence, killers do a fairly effective job if applied properly. Since the chemicals kill all seed, whether weed or good grass, the trick is to sow grass lawns in the early fall only, and to apply pre-emergent chemicals in the spring. By that time, all the good grass will have caught hold, and the killer chemicals will attack only the germinating seeds--the crab grass and other undesirable weeds--that remain. Even if used properly, however, the killers may cause some harmful side effects.

Compounds that contain calcium arsenate, for example, may damage annual bluegrass; those containing dacthal and zytron can harm fescues and bent grasses. Two new chemicals, calcium propyl arsenate and diphenatrile, have yet to be fully proved in all conditions. And as good as they are, none of the killers are 100% effective. Besides, no chemical can control the fellow next door, whose grass crabbed because he didn't use Don't, and as a result the pest inches stealthily across the property line carrying the seeds (about 50,000 per plant) of a monstrous population explosion.

Short of atom-bombing one's lawn (or one's neighbor's), the only way to fight this infiltration is to get down and pluck. This requires, first, a cold, sharp eye and a strong back. Beyond that, it all depends on the gardener's psychological makeup. One familiar type detests routine plucking, but he keeps alert enough en route to his car in the morning or to the backyard barbecue in the evening, and can spot, swoop and pluck without so much as a change in stride or loss of one of the 50,000 seeds. The second major type abhors garden work of all kinds, but when forced, kneels and begins working his way along the train of crab grass with such insatiable preoccupation that he soon disappears down the block, leaving behind a trail of bald spots.

Fed Up. To some suburbanites' horror, there are also many householders who simply no longer care about crab grass. It is green, after all, and it chokes out the less hardy weeds; moreover, it scarcely stands out in a well-mowed lawn. These people do not even mind that crab grass turns an unsightly brown with the first frost. At backyard cocktail parties, they move off in disdainful clusters to talk about Cuba or Kennedy's war on expense accounts while the antis exchange pointed views on calcium arsenate.

From such casual miffs can flow great neighborhood rifts. In Berkeley, Calif., John Klein, a labor unionist, got fed up with the host of ills that infested his soil, planted his whole lawn this year with hardy ivy. Last week his status-conscious neighbors decided that this was going too far, and slapped him with a lawsuit for violating a neighborhood compact whose fine print requires that lawns and gardens be kept "in a good and husbandlike manner." None of this would have happened if only somebody in The Bronx had been more alert in the first place.

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