The easiest way to make something look like a "lawn" is to mow it. I suspect you just aren't mowing enough. At minimum, you need to mow once a week. Do not cut is short to avoid cutting more often. If you mow at the highest setting your mower allows, you will benefit the grass and help fight your weed problem.

Also, if you want grass to grow, you are going to have to fertilize it occasionally. If you are worried about runoff, you can use an organic fertilizer - the choices are many, but simple alfalfa pellets do fine. At minimum, fertilize this fall, but the grass would be happier with a feeding in spring and 2-3 in fall.

For seeding, the easiest method is winter sowing. Basically, you wait until it starts to get pretty cool in fall, but before the snow falls. Seed at about twice the recommended rate and just let it sit there over the winter. Nature will work most of the seeds into the ground and they will grow in spring. You won't get as good as results as properly prepping the area, seeding, watering, fertilizing etc, but it is an easy way to get "good enough."

Hmm... OK, I was thinking that the dust bowl section where nothing grows until summer (and then it's a wilderness of really ugly non-grasslike weeds) was a reason not to mow. I'd been doing it short because then the weedy forms are less obvious, too.

I have looked at some of the pictures of quackgrass and nutsedge and ... you'll all laugh, but if my lawn was full of those right now, I'd be a happy woman! Most of what I have is broadleaf and shrub-shaped. (ie, branches out, not grass-like at all!)

I will be good and start mowing higher and more frequently, watering and feeding. If I were to consider "properly prepping, seeding, watering, fertilizing..." (if I get so I can mow and water like I mean it, maybe I can sneak up on some of the rest of this, too)... what is this "prepping?" I understand watering, feeding, seeding and I even have a Scotts spreader a friend gave me when she bought a better one.

If you don't want to spend the time on it and learn the ins and outs, then you can hire a reputable lawn service to tend to the lawn for you. And by lawn service, I don't mean TruGreen or one of those, I mean someone who will mow it and all of that.

billl's advice is great. It is the bare minimum, which seems to be what you are after. I would just elaborate on what he said.

It doesn't sound like you are doing any watering, but if I am wrong and you are, you should be watering on the INfrequent side. Frequent (i.e. daily or even 3x per week) is going to encourage more weeds. All turf and grassy weed seed needs nearly continual moisture to germinate. If you water frequently, you are giving those weed seeds just what the need. If you water only once a week and let the soil surface dry out, then the weed seeds cannot germinate. Of course Mother Nature has her own ideas about when to water, but you don't have to help her. If you had an inch of rain in the past 7 days, you don't have to water. If your soil surface is moist, you certainly don't have to water. If your grass plants look pretty good but the soil surface is dry and hard, you probably still don't have to water, but you do need to keep an eye on it.

billl's suggestion to keep the lawn mowing height higher is helpful, too. If you get rain daily for long enough to sprout the weed seeds, tall grass will shade out the seedlings and prevent them from photosynthesizing enough to set a good root. Competition from healthy grass is usually enough to keep weeds out.

If you already have broadleaf weeds, then they are shading out your grass and they have to be removed. The greatest tool to come along for that is the Weed Hound. You can get one for $20 at most garden centers and box stores.

Using an organic fertilizer like alfalfa (available in 50-pound bags at your local feed store) should make your lake people happy. It "fertilizes" by feeding the microbes that decompose it. Those microbes in turn feed the 100,000 different species of microbes living in the soil. What that means is that no chemicals will be washed down into the lake. Everything you apply to your soil stays in your soil and makes those microbe more healthy. Then they will take care of your lawn for you. Any ground grain is good. I also like corn meal. The application rate is 10-20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. If you use more it won't hurt. After you apply, water it just enough to wet it, not wash it away. That will start the decomposition and feeding. In 21 days you should notice the grass is significantly greener than it was.

quirky - I know I could hire this done, but I'm too cheap for that, right now. My "grand plan" is to reduce the amount of the yard that requires mowing by adding perennial beds and other features. (Some would say I'm trading easy care for harder work, but I LIKE puttering in the garden, not listening to my mower.)

dchall - no, I haven't done any watering. Here in Southern NH, we had somewhat too much rain recently, so the ground is nice and damp.

I got the lawn mower out yesterday. I treat my lawn mower about like I've treated my lawn, which is to say, badly. So of course, though she started OK, she was making funny sounds underneath. I shut it down and took a peak at the blade. OMG. It's a mulching blade and I recalled hitting one of the largest "sudden harvest" rocks I keep finding in the lawn. The blade was bent back on itself on one side. So my husband will take it in for service on Monday. So... hmm... need to mow, need to mow now... some of the weeds are ankle high already and budding... so I got busy and pulled a bunch of them and bagged 'em. I think they might be a plantain. They have a whorl of long round tipped leaves at ground level and shoot up a branching flowering plant out of the middle. They had very shallow roots and came up easily.

We raked and blew yesterday, and I was distressed to find that almost all of my so called lawn is a variety of mosses with grass plants and weeds mixed in. I have lots of work to do, huh?

BTW, I usually don't put the bag on the mower, because it falls off every 3 steps and makes me crazy. Should I be bagging and dumping the cuttings, to reduce the amount of re-seeding the weeds are doing? Or should I be mulching the cuttings back in for "free" feeding?

Thanks for the explanation of how the organic fertilizers work. I had no idea that something so simple (besides manure) would work.

Hi, I'm back. As it turned out, the service places are running 2 - 3 weeks out. Since the mower started up OK, hubby decided to buy the new blade and be done with that. I mowed today. Someone in this thread suggested "the highest setting your mower allows," but that's higher than all the grass and most of the weeds! I set the blade 2.5" from the ground. That still only knicked the ends of most of the weeds. Boy, there's nothing like walking over every inch of the mess to see what your bad habits of the past have resulted in. I think the previous owner probably mowed more frequently than I have, because I don't recall it looking this bad when I bought the place.

I'll try to take some pictures of some of the stuff I have - lots of wild strawberry (all flowering!), plantain, other floppy leafed things, tall things that look like mini trees, and a tone of curly leafed creeping viny things. Oddly enough, many of the things growing in the lawn look simliar to (but not exactly like) some of the perennials in the nearby garden. But I know they are not self-seeded examples of those, because they look just enough different that I recognize them as weeds trying to get a toehold in my world! Last year, I thought I might let the far end of the side yard (our lot is tiny in the back, and big in the front and on one side)become a "meadow." So I'd stopped mowing a section of it, and encouraged the natural wildflowers such as Queen Ann's lace. It was rather interesting looking, but I could see it didn't coordinate with the rest of what I'm doing here. Now I have their cabbagy looking wrinkly selves popping up all over the place. I have only my own nutball whimsical self to thank for that, huh?

Yesterday, I spot treated (OMG that's a lot of "spots!") the ugliest clumps of weeds with Ortho WeedBegone2. How long does it take for them to die, after they've been sprayed? The all looked hardy as the dickens when I was out there with the mower today. Shouldn't they be feeling poorly and asking for a doctor by now?