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The ABCs of Lawn Care: How to Keep Your Yard Green and Healthy

Maintaining a lawn can be overwhelming sometimes. To keep the grass green and healthy, you must water it at precisely the right times. Plus, you have to remember best practices like aerating, mowing, and fertilizing, among other things.

Making a misstep or forgetting to perform a task altogether can lead to all sorts of unpleasant consequences, dry and dead grass included. If worse comes to worst, you may even need to shell out a considerable amount of money to replace your lawn if it turns out to be really bad.

Fortunately, landscaping professionals in Lees Summit, MO came up with a neat trick you can use to remember everything that needs to be done in lawn care. They believe that you can apply something you learned as early as pre-school – the ABCs – in ensuring that your lawn stays green and healthy.

A

Aerate the lawn regularly

Aerating is a vital process in proper lawn care. It entails breaking up the soil to allow air, water, and nutrients to reach the deeper roots of the grass. This should be done one to two times annually.

To do this, take a spade to make holes in the soil. If you have a bigger lawn, a self-propelled motorized aerator may help you do the work faster and better. However, for yards bigger than three acres, it may be best to hire a landscaper or lawn care professional for the job.

B

Bare patches should be seeded

No matter how much you try, there will still be some instances wherein your lawn will have bare or bald patches. To keep the grass even, you should seed over these patches. Below are the steps to follow:

  1. Slightly water the area to leave the soil moist and disturb the area slightly using a rake.
  2. Sprinkle grass seeds all over the bare areas. After that, cover these with about a quarter of an inch of soil.
  3. After seeding, water the area again. Do this twice or thrice every day until you see new growth along the area.
  4. Don’t forget to nurture the newly planted grass with organic mulch and ready-made lawn fertilizers.

Although you can perform this task at any time of the year, it is strongly advised that you seed bare patches during the fall to get the best results.

C

Cut grass at just the right length

While cutting grass may seem like a simple task, it actually requires enough knowledge about how it may affect your lawn. Remember that tall grass is equivalent to a healthy lawn. In fact, experts say that it should be left to grow up to 3.5 inches or 8.9 centimeters tall, as much as possible.

However, if you can no longer stand the unruly appearance of grass, you can mow it until it reaches about two inches in height. If not, try to keep the cutting to a maximum of a third of the entire length of the grass blade as cutting more than that could result in serious damage to your grass.

The key is to remove only a third of the grass’s overall height during a single mowing session. Repeat after a couple of days to get your desired grass height without harming the vegetation. For quick-growing species, a three- or four-day interval during spring should suffice.

D

Don’t forget to water

Watering is the most basic gardening task out there, but you must still remember to do it right.

If you do not have sprinklers, you should at least have a water hose nozzle attached to your hose. It is also important to water your lawn during the right time of day. The cool, low-wind, and humid conditions early in the morning or late in the evenings support optimal water distribution while keeping water loss due to evaporation at a minimum. If you have sprinklers, you should set it to turn on at around 10 p.m. to 12 midnight or 8 a.m. to 9 a.m.

On the other hand, this schedule can change depending on several factors, including:

  • Grass species
  • Lawn health
  • Heat level
  • Soil conditions

This means that grass species that thrive in the cold weather such as ryegrass, fescues, and bluegrass require about 1 to 1.5 inches or 2.5 to 3.8 centimeters of water weekly. This will go up to about 2.25 inches or 5.7 centimeters during the warmer months.

Meanwhile, buffalo grass, blue grama, and other drought-resistant grasses that survive hot weather don’t need to be watered too often as they can thrive weeks without being watered.

E

Expert lawn service is a must

While it may be tempting to go the DIY route on most lawn care tasks, it is still important that you bring in professionals to help every once in a while. Aside from offering expert advice, they can also make sure that your lawn stays in great shape and help you save on unnecessary costs of seeding grass too often.

F

Fertilize the lawn once the grass starts to grow

Fertilization is another essential part of keeping a healthy lawn as it offers added and equal nourishment to the grass.

After mowing it twice, you can already start fertilizing using the lightest application recommendation from the manufacturer. Be sure to check the package for any instructions. You should also look for a list of certain species of grass that thrive well using that particular fertilizer mix.

In addition, water the lawn immediately after applying fertilizers. This will ensure that the nutrients get deeper into the soil and onto the grass roots.

Remember to fertilize at least once a year to ensure grass health. Of course, you have the option to go beyond this. Just make sure you choose a product that contains between 30 and 50 percent slow-release fertilizer. This will ensure that your lawn will not get burned up by the chemicals and will avoid excessive growth.

Learn Basic Lawn Care with ABC

Learning basic lawn care doesn’t need to be difficult if you use a proper tactic to remember the most important things about the matter. To make things easier, use the ABCs as your guide in maintaining a green and healthy lawn as demonstrated in this article.