Feeling Lawnly? Take this Grass Quiz!

Answer: Kentucky blue grass

Kentucky blue grass is considered one of the least drought-tolerant grasses, requiring much more frequent watering to maintain a rich green appearance. Some grasses like sheep fescue, buffalo grass, and blue grama are drought tolerant and their seeds are widely available. Some companies like Scotts have turf-building grass seeds, which use coconut fiber to help yield thicker grass while needing much less water.

Answer: "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" condemned other insecticides as well, insisting that their use was damaging to nature, harming various species of birds and wildlife. She wrote that the use of chlordane and arsenic to control pests was also unwise.
Azadirachtin, from the seeds of the neem tree, has become a better alternative. Trichlorfon has been used to control grubs, but that too has been considered harmful to the human nervous system, which led to the use of nematodes instead, tiny worms that attack grubs.
"American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn" by Ted Steinberg (2006) and "Grasses of a Thousand Colors" by Wallace Shawn (2008) were both written over a half century later than "Silent Spring."
"The Death of Grass", by John Christopher (1956) is a science fiction novel.

Answer: False

While on average, American families use 30% of their water outdoors, that percentage rises to 70% in the West where water is scarcer. In 2009, Clark County, Nevada had banned planting turf in the front yards of new homes. The Environmental Protection Agency tried to incentivize landscapers to use a "regionally appropriate" amount of water. Here's an example of an odd mixed message though: In 2007, a 70-year-old widow named Betty Perry of Orem, Utah was arrested and handcuffed by police after refusing to give her name. She was cited for having a "brown, sickly" yard, according to FoxNews.

Answer: Maintaining grass instead of wildflowers

Native plants, like beds of wildflowers and dandelions (meaning "lion's tooth" in Old French) or moss cost 68% less to maintain than grass. Instead of grass, some gardeners prefer blue carpet juniper, or wild flowers, or sprinkle-on moss, all of which require little maintenance.

Hardscaping is also way of saving cost in a way, because it is the use of patios and paved surfaces which can reduce the time that homeowners spend on lawn maintenance, which on average is about 40 hours a year. Simple rain catch-systems, like rain barrels can save the average gardener 1,300 gallons of water a summer. Using a compost bin for homegrown fertilizer saves a typical homeowner over $50 a year.

Answer: Louis XIV

King Louis XIV hired the architect Louis Le Vau, painter Charles Le Brun, and landscape architect André Le Nôtre to design the gardens of Versailles. The work on the French formal style garden would take 40 years to complete, and consisted of sophisticated geometric layouts, wide open lawns, ornamental flower gardens called parterres, and fountains, all of which influenced the design of lawns worldwide.

Answer: Monticello

In a project lasting over forty years (1707-1809), Thomas Jefferson designed the neoclassical mansion and gardens at his Monticello home in Virginia, inspired by the English pleasure gardens he visited in 1786. English-style lawns typically feature large, expansive, meticulously maintained grass on gently rolling hills instead of flat lawns typical of French formal lawn gardens.

Their borders feature mixed flower beds and naturalistic planting. The lawns often feature small ponds, fountains, and streams as gravel pathways meander the grounds. Decorative features known as "ferme ornee", such as garden benches, are placed in strategically pleasant areas. Jefferson described in an 1806 letter he wrote, that the lawns "are in a form very difficult to be managed."

Answer: Agent Orange

The clever thing about 2,4-D (2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) and other herbicides is their ability to attack broadleaf weeds, while not harming most grasses. Over 1,500 herbicide products have 2,4-D as an ingredient, mixed with other herbicides like mecoprop and dicamba. 2,4-D was one of the two main ingredients in Agent Orange, used by the U.S. military in Vietnam, with deadly effects, leading to more than 400,000 Vietnamese deaths from exposure from 1962-1971, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Answer: Push lawn mower

Manually pushed lawn mowers, aka reel lawn mowers, have helically-positioned blades that rotate when pushed along, cutting the grass into lawn clippings. You can burn 408 calories an hour using a push mower, and typically, people spend only $5 to $10 a year on its maintenance. Mr. Budding's design had an iron frame, iron gear wheels, and a cutting cylinder with five-to-seven spiral blades that rotated against a stationary blade as it was pushed. Mr. Hills' design, called the Archimedean, was smaller, more compact.

Answer: White clover

Sometimes it can be hard to label what is a weed and what isn't; however, weeds like white clover (Trifolium repens) actually help cut down on the grubs that feed on grass roots. Having white clover along a lawn may help deter white grubs, since clover is not a preferred food source for them, but even more significantly, white clover is a natural fertilizer for grass because it takes nitrogen from the air and releases it into the soil so that plants and grass can use it. And its deep root system helps prevent soil erosion, and reduces water runoff. When white clover grows and then decomposes, it adds organic matter to the soil helping fertility.
Crabgrass (Digitaria) quickly takes over and outcompetes the preferred lawn grass as it spreads rapidly and forms clumps.
Dandelions (Taraxacum) have long hard-to-remove taproots that also take over lawns and deprive lawn grass of space, water and nutrients.
Nutsedge, akla Nutgrass (Cyperus) looks like grass but has triangular stems, and is difficult to get a handle on as it deprives lawn grasses of nutrients and water, spreading aggressively through stems.

Answer: Ammonium phosphate

Americans buy more than four million tons of chemical fertilizer a year, mostly in concentrated and water-soluble forms. Ammonium phosphate fertilizer contains ammonium which provides nitrogen, and phosphate which provides phosphorus, both of which are beneficial to plants and grass, but in excess amounts can be harmful. For instance, nitrogen and phosphorus can run off in rainstorms, and then contaminate water tables, our drinking water, rivers and streams, and poison turbo-feeding algae; it can then also smother fish. It also takes a lot of fossil fuel to produce most synthetic fertilizers.

Glyphosate is an herbicide weed killer, one of the active ingredients in Roundup; Carbaryl and Bifenthrin are both pesticides, that although they do kill some bad insects, also kill some beneficial ones, and can be harmful to humans.