Lawn Maintenance

Caring for your lawn doesn't require a huge investment of time or money - all you have to do is follow a few simple steps and your garden will be the envy of all your neighbors.

During the summer the biggest issue is the scorching heat. It can destroy your lawn, turning it brown and making it a safe haven for everything that can cause damage, such as weeds, insects, and disease. Luckily, there are steps you can take to maintain your yard and keep the grass looking green and healthy all year long.

Essentially, it's all about prevention. Issues that crop up in the summer months can be avoided by caring for your lawn at the beginning of the growing season. A thick and healthy lawn provides its own level of protection, in that it can more easily defend itself against weeds, insects, and diseases.

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What you can do

1. Before the grass starts to grow, aerate and fertilize the lawn (this goes for warm-climate and cool-climate grasses, although for the latter it's best not to fertilize again until autumn. Feed warm-climate grasses nitrogen month-to-month as the growing season progresses.)
2. Mowing is more important than you may think. In the spring take the time to sharpen the lawn mower blade so that the grass gets cut cleanly. Clean cut grass is less likely to develop diseases. Also, cut only a third of the grass blade, raising the height of the mower 25-50% as it becomes warmer over the season.
3. Lawns require 1 inch of water per week, which includes any water soaked in from rain and irrigation. When watering, do so uniformly, deeply, and infrequently early in the morning.
4. Caring for your lawn in the middle of the summer is also key to healthy grass. If a summer is particularly hot, cool season grasses go dormant and turn brown in color. The grass does return to its former glory when the weather cools down, but if you don't enjoy the sight of a brown lawn, watering every week should do the trick.
5. Longer grass mid-summer isn't a bad thing because the extra grass will keep the root zone cool and aid in water retention.
6. At the end of the season, this is the appropriate time to use chemical weed control in the cooler climates because the weeds are preparing for the next season and are more vulnerable to chemicals at this time of year.
7. In the fall cut the lawn slightly shorter than usual so that in the spring the ground will dry up more readily.

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