A pesticide-free park or yard does take more work, but, it can be done, and you will like the results. (Sunday article, “Pesticide-free is not so easy.”)

The easy way to kill dandelions is to chop them up in place. A shovel works better than a hoe in hard ground. Just make sure the root is cut in several places, and the plant will probably not come back. Also, the flowers of the true dandelion — which has only one flower per plant — are edible and tasty.It saddens me to see people applying chemicals just to make their lawn look like a green carpet. The way to fertilize a lawn is to go out when it is raining and sew in clover — the kind with the small white flowers, not the larger purple clover. Clover is a legume and fixes nitrogen. Grass grows greener and stronger intermixed with clover. And clover is more drought tolerant.Roundup is unnecessary. If you want to kill weeds coming up through cracks in the driveway, hit them with a spray of vinegar. Acetic acid kills pretty much all plants.

Turf Builder and Weed & Feed contain 2,4-D, a possible endocrine disrupter and carcinogen. When you use it, you are poisoning children, birds, and our salmon too because some of your chemicals flow into the Sound. We are concerned about the gradual extinction of the salmon, so why are these chemicals still legal to use here?

Anything that can be grown organically should be grown organically[, and that includes lawns].

James Robert Deal 
Lynnwood