can landscape pebbles be my problem?

rittenburg – posted 31 January 2007 08:18

I have a 30 year old house with floritam grass. Originally the house had 4 foot beds with a thick layer of pea gravel on clear plastic. The borders have sunk into the sand, the plastic is long gone, and the pea gravel has eroded out to 5-8 feet wide by four to six inches deep. Within six feet of house I am unable to keep healthy grass. I have fertilized, bugged, raked, manured, watered, babied, and coddled these areas to no avail. I have raked out old grass and put down sod. The sod lasted about 1 year and then started dying off. The problem seems to follow the amount of landscape pebbles that have eroded out into the soil. In the worst areas the pebbles make up about 25% of the soil volume in top 4 inches of dirt. I have a hard time getting even healthy weeds in these areas. I am at a loss to understand what is going on. The floritam will spread out and grow on the driveway. Why should a few pebbles matter? No matter how healthy I manage to get this area it will die off the very instant anything goes wrong. When I get grubs or forget to turn on the sprinklers this area will go completely dead before the rest of yard even gets brown spots.

I can’t figure it out. Could the problem be the pebbles? If so is there an easier way to fix it than digging out all that dirt?

TIA