NATHAN SKID / Crain's Detroit Business

New Kentucky bluegrass will be installed this month at Comerica Park in the first full-field sod replacement at the ballpark since 2007.

The Detroit Tigers soon will begin using plows, trucks and snow blowers to remove the layer of snow from the playing surface at Comerica Park so new grass can be installed and ready in time for Opening Day on March 31, the team said today.

As reported Monday by Crain's, the Tigers organization bought 103,000 square feet of Kentucky bluegrass from Fort Morgan, Colo.-based Graff's Turf Farm.

The turf is to arrive in refrigerated trucks beginning the week of March 17.

This will be first full-field replacement at the 15-year-old ballpark since 2007.

Since the initial set-up for the Winter Festival in November, when the grass was removed for a temporary ice hockey rink, the entire playing surface has been covered with a textile filter fabric that prevents debris and contaminates from entering the sub-surface, the team said.

The fabric also allows the Tigers' groundskeeping staff to remove snow without removing or displacing the root zone.

The infield and turf areas since Monday have been heated with surface-level construction-grade, 750,000 BTU trailer heaters, which blow warm air under large tarps, the team said.

Once the snow is gone, the field will be leveled.

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Tigers to truck out snow to make way for new Comerica Park grass

Photos by Brendan OConnor

Weve all heard this story before: An academic, hippie environmentalist moves into a middle-class suburban neighborhood where neighbors like their front yards tended and prefer their lawns to have conservative buzz cuts, just like their men. The new neighbor has other ideas, however, and upsets the balance. People start to worry about their property values, pests and the aesthetics of their otherwise quiet subdivision. Its the age-old tale of living in the burbs the neighbors grass isnt always greener, especially when its dotted with radishes and dandelions instead of bright green sod.

Shon Law is a 32-year-old tech start-up wizard who foundedsocial media website, Nebber, a few years back. Hes also a Longwood resident who refuses to mow his lawn. In fact, hes decided to stop interfering with his yard altogether in favor of planting edibles and letting it go native, a decision that his neighbors and the city are not happy about. Law is being fined $300 a day for abandoning the traditional grassy lawn for a quilt-like expanse of ankle- to knee-high tufty native grasses, weedy plants and isolated patches of vegetables. Law has placed a path of square cement blocks around the plot to try to make it look a little more civilized, but they really only emphasize how high and overgrown the grass is.

To date, Law has accumulated well over $130,000 in fines for breaking city codes, mostly dealing with the length of his grass and attracting pests. The city of Longwood has placed a lien against his property in an effort to make Law change his ways, but he says he doesnt plan to change a thing.

Video: Shon Law explains his farming philosophy

When asked why, he says he believes hes doing the right thing. This area is a food desert, which means no food is readily available here and it has to be trucked in from somewhere else, he says. Sure, I could move out to Bithlo, but I bought this house here, and I have a right to do what I think is best on this property. This is a free city, and we cannot bar a property owner from doing something on the basis of aesthetics. If something happened and food was no longer being brought to this area, all of these people would starve.

Law is practicing the art of permaculture, a method of agriculture rooted in natural ecosystems. His goal, like the goal of many permaculturists who went before him, is to bring sustainable, local sources of food closer to home.

Related: Watch more videos of Shon Law talking about his landscape.

Clashes between radical locavores and their more traditional neighbors have grown more common as interest in sustainable food production has increased. In 2012, a College Park couple faced fines of more than $500 a day after neighbors complained that their front-yard vegetable garden was against code. In response to the controversy, the city of Orlando eventually rewrote its landscaping code to allow city residents to dedicate a limited amount of their property to edible plants.

>Email Brendan OConnor

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Longwood front-yard farmer stands by his permaculture plot

If you are like most gardeners you have some green spots, weedy spots and bare spots in the home lawn. Now just as the spring growing season is about to begin is the best time to regreen the entire home lawn.

First decide what portion of the lawn can be saved. Then dig out or spot kill the weedy areas with Roundup, Finale or similar weed control products labeled for lawn renovation. After the weeds begin to brown rake out the dead portions and till these and barren areas several inches deep to prepare the planting site.

Quickly reestablish a new lawn using plugs or sod of St. Augustine and seed or sod of bahia grass. Keep new lawns moist and apply a first feeding in 3 to 4 weeks. Then follow these tips to keep the home turf attractive.

- Mow when the grass reaches the desired height.

- Water when spots of grass begin to curl the leaf blades and turn a pale green.

- Give new lawns a repeat feeding in early summer.

- Check weekly for insects and diseases that need control.

- Hand pull or spot kill weeds becoming established.

Spring is a great time to reestablish your lawn. Now is the time to feed most lawns too with a quality lawn fertilizer found at your garden centers. One lawn fertilizer is usually suitable for all lawn types. Just follow the information on the label to make the best application that regreens your lawn.

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Put the Green Back In Your Lawn

Grass sod in the gutter. Wiltshire
This grass sod had been in this gutter for some time. We won in the end.

By: A Cleaner Group

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Grass sod in the gutter. Wiltshire - Video

NATHAN SKID / Crain's Detroit Business

New Kentucky bluegrass will be installed this month at Comerica Park in the first full-field sod replacement at the ballpark since 2007.

The National Hockey League, along with the Detroit Red Wings and Olympia Entertainment, are splitting the cost of the new grass field that will be installed at Comerica Park in time for the Detroit Tigers season opener on March 31.

The cost and how it's being apportioned among the three entities hasn't been disclosed. Olympia is the entertainment management arm of the Ilitch family's business holdings, which include the Wings and Tigers.

New natural grass fields at major league ballparks range in price from $100,000 to $250,000, turf industry insiders say.

The contract for the 103,000 square feet of Kentucky bluegrass, which will be the first full-field replacement at the 15-year-old ballpark since 2007, was awarded to Fort Morgan, Colo.-based Graff's Turf Farm.

The NHL agreed to pick up costs at Comerica Park as part of the deal it swung with Red Wings and Tigers owner Mike Ilitch to host its Winter Classic at Michigan Stadium instead of Comerica Park.

At a cost of up to $1 million, the NHL paid Kitty Hawk, N.C.-based Rink Specialists Inc. to build a temporary ice rink on Comerica Park's infield for the Hockeytown Winter Festival games at the end of December.

The Winter Festival was the downtown Detroit portion of the Winter Classic, which was played at Michigan Stadium between the Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs.

For the Winter Festival, all of the Comerica Park grass was removed. A woven barrier was put over the bare dirt to protect it until the sod is installed once the snow clears. The ice rink was removed last month.

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NHL, Red Wings to pay for replacement Tigers field at Comerica

American political culture always seems to be celebrating the anniversary of something, be it JFKs assassination (we just passed the 50th anniversary of that sad event) or the signing of some (mostly bad) legislation. The latest political activity to be enshrined with an anniversary is the so-called stimulus, the $800 billion monstrosity passed five years ago ostensibly to put America back to work.

Not surprisingly, the New York Times has editorialized that any criticism of the spending bill at least any criticism which says too much was spent is a Republican myth and falsehood. Not only was the Stimulus a legitimate piece of legislation, sniffed the NYT, but it also:

prevented a second recession that could have turned into a depression. It created or saved an average of 1.6 million jobs a year for four years. (Where are the jobs, Mr. Boehner.) It raised the nations economic output by 2 to 3 percent from 2009 to 2011. It prevented a significant increase in poverty without it, 5.3 million additional people would have become poor in 2010.

Like all examples of the Broken Window Fallacy, the spirited defense of this spending bill is based upon accounting methods that count the people hired through stimulus spending as new jobs but fail to note how others might have lost their own means of employment. Now, this was a bill that, among other things, had workers rolling sod into the grass median of I-68 (which is near my home) in an area where runoff collected from tons of salt thrown onto roads by state highway crews (our area receives a lot of snowfall). Not surprisingly, within a year, all of the new grass was dead.

I liken the stimulus to throwing a bit of lighter fluid onto a pile of soaking wet wood. The flames pop up for a few seconds, but then disappear as the effects from the fluid go away. (No, repeated douses of stimulus fluid do not ultimately gain traction and then lead to a miraculous economic recovery.)

If Beltway political culture permits any criticism of the Holy Stimulus, it is this: the stimulus wasnt big enough. Intones the NYT: The stimulus could have done more good had it been bigger and more carefully constructed.

The rest of the editorial is a compilation of near-plagiarism from Paul Krugmans columns and blog posts, and it reflects how Keynesian anti-wogic works. The logical narrative goes as follows:

Should one question the Keynesian premises of this awful syllogism, the standard answer is: America had full employment during World War II. (Robert Higgs has thoroughly debunked this enduring myth.) But, then, so did Germany and the U.S.S.R., according to Keynesian standards, but no one envies what people there experienced!

The problem that occurs when one wishes to interpret the results of the Stimulus is not due to bad politics. To put it another way, Stimulus spending always will confer political benefits, given that the money is transferred from taxpayers to preferred political constituents. Those footing the bill include both present and future taxpayers, since they will have to pay later for the public debt incurred to pay for present stimulus spending.

I make this point because the stimulus always has been presented as a government action that improved general or overall economic conditions, as opposed to being a political wealth-transfer scheme. The NYT editorial drips with what only can be a religious faith in the whole system, as though politicians seeking votes are going to carefully construct a process that is aimed at making certain political constituencies better off but at the expense of other constituencies.

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Anti-Logic and the Keynesian Stimulus

Dear Neil: What can we use to avoid sticker plants on property near a lake? When do we treat, and what should we use?

A: There are many plants that produce stickers, burs, prickles, thorns, brambles and all other manners of painful appendages. So without knowing the exact plant, Im taking a bit of a long shot. Usually when that question is asked of me, it refers to grassburs, and the best means of dealing with them is to apply a pre-emergent weed killer, usually granular, before the seeds ever start to germinate. In many part of Texas, that means that you must do so immediately, and for northern areas, a couple of weeks from now. Apply Dimension, Halts or other labeled pre-emergent one to two weeks before the average date of the last killing freeze in your area, and then follow that application with a booster shot exactly three months later. The products are effective for about 100 days, hence the need for the second treatment. Water lightly immediately after you make the application.

Dear Neil: We have a large wasp or hornet nest (size of two basketballs) about 40 feet high in an Arizona ash tree. It is in our backyard, and were wondering if we should take any action against it. Their activity is starting to pick up rapidly with the warming weather.

A: Im never going to win on this answer. My first (noncontroversial) suggestion would be to have a licensed pest elimination company or entomologist identify the insects for you. My tendency is always to leave nature alone unless my family, pets or I are threatened. These things are so high and far away from your home that they will probably coexist with humanity without problems. Ive encountered similar outbreaks in the trees out from our house, and Ive never worried much. Yellow jackets are the one insect that I do not allow to build nests in our landscape. They are too aggressive and unpredictable. But their nests are not large. Control, should it be necessary, is definitely a job for a professional due to the height of the nest. Thats not the complete answer you wanted, but its a good start. Finding out what they are will help a lot.

Dear Neil: Last year we transplanted two Italian cypress trees right next to our in-ground pool. They are 8 feet tall and are doing well, but my wife feels we need to move them again, fearing they could hurt the pool. Its hard work, and Im afraid well damage them. Will they hurt the pool if we leave them there?

A: Italian cypress are not known to have huge, damaging roots, but any plant can cause damage to concrete if its planted too close. These trees, left unpruned, will eventually grow to 35 or 45 feet tall, so you will certainly have huge plants there. Talk to pool people. They will know the strength of the side walls of the pool. Have a landscape contractor in to look at the setting. Right next to ... (to use your term) does scare me, but I dont know if you mean 18 inches of several feet away. There would be a big difference.

Dear Neil: We had JaMur zoysia sod planted three years ago. A sprinkler system went in at the same time. It has all done very well, except for one area about 10 feet by 6 feet. The grass was thin there last fall, and it looks like bare ground there now. I fertilized last fall (18-6-12), and all areas are watered uniformly. There is a tree nearby, but it doesnt seem to shade this area any more than the rest of the yard. We do walk across the area as we go into the house, but its supposed to be able to withstand that. What can we do?

A: Lets try to sort through the facts, the unknowns and anything you can do to get to the cause. Start with the sprinklers. They probably wont be the cause, but theyre easy to check. Turn that station on for a few minutes and watch every head to see if it delivers water uniformly to the area of concern. If that seems to be fine, move on to the shade. In most cases where Im called to a friends home for this kind of troubleshooting, it ends up being excessive shade. Im not saying thats true in your case, but it is in probably 95 percent of the landscapes I visit. There is a threshold of how much light grass must have to survive. Just a few feet can make an hours difference in the amount of shading, therefore in the vigor of the turf. Do the best you can at this early, still-bare time of the growing season, to see if there might be any significant difference. Visit the spot several times over the course of a sunny day to watch the shadow patterns. I would doubt that the foot traffic is the cause. You would have seen paths. You could also do a little probing and digging to see if the soil in that area is the same as in the rest of your lawn. It may have shallow rock. If none of that comes up with a lead, try some more grass this spring. That wont be very expensive, and maybe you can watch it more closely to see what transpires.

If youd like Neils help with your plant question, drop him a note to Gardeners Mailbag, PO Box 864, McKinney, TX 75070 or email your questions to mailbag@sperrygardens.com. Watch here for his reply.

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Best way to deal with grassburs is by applying a pre-emergent weed killer

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) -- Knoxville city work crews have already started laying a new paved walkway in Market Square.

The plans are to cut down on maintenance costs and protect the roots of six sawtooth oaks on the south end of the Square. A city spokesperson says those trees are already showing signs of stress.

Well be creating a multi-use area that will be beneficial to people and to the trees, says City Urban Forester Kasey Krouse.

This will be a more user-friendly space. Its an extension of whats in Krutch Park landscaping with a walkway.

The south lawn has been a trouble spot for the city before; crews have overseeded and put down new sod 2-3 times a year, but heavy use continued to kill the grass and is compacting the root systems for the six trees.

These trees are the staple image of Market Square, Krouse said.

The project is expected to cost between $6,000 to $8,000.

Were wanting attractive green space that also prevents wasted and, up until now, unsuccessful maintenance, said Public Service Director David Brace. Brace says the regular re-sodding was both expensive and required keeping people off the new grass for several months out of the year.

The landscaping project is expected to be completed by the end of March.

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Knoxville's Market Square to undergo landscape renovations

On a week where clouds fill the skies carrying the ever threat of rain, the agency that oversees water resources in the Tampa region loosened its recommended lawn watering restrictions a bit.

Beginning on Saturday, homeowners who had been under a once-a-week watering restriction can now open up the sprinklers twice a week.

The governing board of the Southwest Florida Water Management District voted to continue the Phase II water shortage order through July 31, but it did include a provision to allow the twice-a-week watering, recognizing lawns need more water now that the days are getting longer, the temperature is getting hotter and the rain over the next three months typically is scarce.

Heres the schedule for when to water in unincorporated Hillsborough County and the city of Tampa:

Addresses ending in 0, 1, 2 or 3 can water on Mondays and Thursdays

Addresses ending in 4, 5 or 6, Tuesdays and Fridays

Addresses ending in 7, 8 or 9, Wednesdays and Saturdays

Locations with no address such as common areas and locations with mixed addresses, such as office complexes and shopping centers, can water on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

All watering must be done before 8 a.m. or after 6 p.m., and only once on the designated days.

The restrictions apply to all residences and businesses and includes homeowners with private wells and ponds or lakes that are used as alternate irrigation supplies. Reclaimed water customers are exempt from the water restrictions.

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Water rules loosened in Tampa, unincorporated Hillsborough

Martin Truex Jr. started this season engulfed in flames and spraying sod. And somehow, it was better than how last season ended.

Last year, Truex got caught up in one of those once-a-decade or so NASCAR controversies. He was expelled from the playoffs after two other drivers, unknown to Truex, conspired to help him earn a Chase spot.

This year, Truex is driving in calmer circumstances like when his car caught on fire on the final turn Thursday at a Daytona 500 qualifier, forcing him to carve up grass in the infield and cross the finish line in flames. Truex, who had already qualified for a front-row spot for Sunday's 500, instead will be booted to the back of the pack. After what happened last year, it's a step in the right direction.

A second-generation race car driver, Truex will pilot his first race Sunday with Denver's Furniture Row Racing team in the No. 78 car abandoned by Kurt Busch. For Truex, his new chance with a new team is not about getting revenge on the string-pullers who kicked him out of the Chase. It's about getting back to his roots running on what he calls "a ragged edge."

"I raced my butt off because I loved it," said Truex, who started behind the wheel when he was 12. Like his father, he became a well-known driver on the Busch North Series regional circuit.

"I loved going to the track on a Saturday night and maybe getting beat and saying, 'Man, you better get back to work.' Then maybe turning the tables and coming back the next week to whip their (butts). That's what I loved."

It's now 10 years after Furniture Row owner Barney Visser made his NASCAR debut with the No. 78, with Jerry Robertson driving in the second-tier Busch Series. But despite making it to the 13-team Chase playoffs last season with Kurt Busch, FRR still gets a thumbed nose in its direction by the other big-money teams in NASCAR. In the racing world, you don't read a reference to Furniture Row without the qualifier "single-car team" and "only Sprint Cup team outside the Carolinas."

Martin Truex Jr. takes the wheel of Furniture Row's No. 78 Chevrolet this season. (John Raoux, The Associated Press)

But that's what drew Truex to Denver. And it may be that the 78 on a technical alliance with big-team Richard Childress Racing and with a Chase-level driver is near the point of morphing from "those other guys" to a serious, consistent contender.

"Back in the old days, you kinda flew by the seat of your pants," Truex said. "It's fun to be a part of that again. Because it's like it used to be."

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Martin Truex Jr. back on NASCAR track after rough ride in '13