Did you know that how you maintain your lawn determines its health? If you’re noticing brown patches in your lawn, you may have one of the following issues:
- A lawn fungus
- Pet urine patches
- Too much foot traffic
- Excessive thatch
- Grub damage.
Also, treating lawn diseases depends on where you’re located and if you have cool or warm season grasses. There are plenty of ways for healing brown spots on your lawn.
In this blog post, you’ll learn
- How to identify brown spots in your lawn
- Learn the causes of those brown spots
- Tips for healing brown spots in your lawn.
How to Identify Brown Spots in Your Lawn
You may find that the brown patches on your lawn are small, the size of a silver dollar, or the brown spot is creeping through your yard and getting larger. Is the grass dead, dormant, or diseased?
If you have a dog that goes to the same spot each time for its potty needs, you can make the connection that your dog causes those brown spots.
Pet urine stains are easy to solve—have your dog go potty in a designated spot and understand that you’ll see brown patches there.
If your lawn has damage not due to pet urine, any other brown spots will have a different cause. For example, your turf could have excessive thatch buildup.
You can back up your theory by cutting out 1 sq. in. of soil. Look at the three layers. The top should be green because it’s live turf, the second layer is tan and has turf debris, and the bottom layer will be soil.
If that tan layer is more than a ½” thick, you have too much thatch that’s suffocating your turfgrass. Thick thatch prevents the soil from receiving water, light, and fertilizer. Plus, the thatch layer can harbor diseases and pests.
You’ll need to dethatch your lawn for healing brown spots caused by thatch.
If you have Brown Patch disease, light brown circular areas will appear in your yard. Brown Patch is a fungal disease caused by too much water and fertilizer. In cool season lawns, it will heal itself.
Learn more: Preventing Lawn Pests and Fungi
However, in warm season grasses and where you live determines if you need to put down fungicides to kill the disease.
Texas and other areas with high humidity, especially at night for many weeks, allow the fungal disease to spread to the rest of your lawn, killing the grass. Fungicides provide healing for brown spots in high humidity and warm season lawns.
While you want your family and friends to enjoy your lawn, too much foot traffic and objects left on the lawn will cause your turfgrass to brown and die back. Foot traffic also causes the soil to compact, meaning less water is absorbed into it.
Finally, grubs and chinch bugs eating the turfgrass’s roots cause your lawn to develop brown patches that could extend into larger patches if not attended to.
Learn the Causes of Brown Spots Infecting Your Turfgrass
Learning the causes of your lawn’s brown spots helps you better manage them so they don’t reappear every spring. While you can train your dog to go potty in specific areas of your yard, the other lawn care tasks require changing your habits.
For example, the culprits that lead to most lawn diseases include high humidity, overwatering, and too much nitrogen fertilizer. Indeed, Brown Patch is a fungal disease caused by overwatering and too much nitrogen added to the lawn.
Here are other causes of brown patches:
- You water your lawn at night, so the water lays on the grass overnight. Mix that with summertime humidity, and you get brown patch disease or other fungal diseases.
- You overwatered your lawn and let the water puddle around the turf. You may do this many times a week.
- Other cultural controls that lead to stressed turfgrass include mowing your lawn in the middle of a hot day, mowing the lawn too short, or not aerating your lawn once every two years.
- You may need to dethatch your lawn if there’s thatch build-up on your turfgrass.
- If you can pull your grass back like a rug and count more than five grubs within 1 sq. in. of turfgrass, the brown patches are caused by grubs eating the roots.
- Chinch bugs are another cause for brown spots growing on your lawn; chinch bugs will suck out plant juices from the grass and cause damage to its vascular system. Brown spots on your lawn can be an indicator of chinch bug damage.
- Foot traffic, including kids playing in the yard and walking the same path to the backyard, can cause brown patches on your lawn. You don’t want to discourage your children from playing in the yard, but you need to aerate and overseed the compacted soil so the grass can grow back.
Watch more: Video: Brinly Plug Aeration vs. Spike Aeration
4 Tips for Healing Brown Spots in Your Lawn
Now that you know what causes those brown spots on the lawn, you can restore your turfgrass to health and vibrancy.
Here are four tips for healing brown spots in your yard:
- Rake up the brown spots
If the brown spots are caused by a fungal disease, such as Brown Patch, sterilize all equipment used in that area. Apply fungicide if you live in an area with high humidity and warm night temperatures. Always read the manufacturer’s directions.
- Cut back on your watering
Lawns only need 1-1 ½” of water per week. If you water more than that, invest in an automated sprinkler system with a moisture controller and set it to turn on in the early morning.
Remember: any rain that fell that week counts toward the lawn’s total watering needs.
You can also invest in soaker hoses with a timer that slowly emits water to the turfgrass’s root area. Set the timer to turn on for 15 to 30 minutes and then turn off. Continue this soak-and-cycle method until 1” of water percolates through the topsoil.
If you have a grub problem in your yard, you can use the following options:
- Apply milky spores that are sold as a powder in your local garden center or retailer.
- Consider using beneficial nematodes, tiny worms you can find in a garden center, retailer, or online.
- Use pesticides specifically made for grubs. Always read and follow the manufacturer’s directions before using.
- Notice Any Chinch Bug Action?
Since chinch bugs thrive in thatch, dethatch your lawn if you have over ½” of it in your yard. Try using natural products first to get rid of chinch bugs with insecticidal soaps and diatomaceous earth (DE).
If these don’t work, you may need to apply pesticides to remove chinch bugs.
- Too Much Foot Traffic Equals Soil Compaction
If the soil feels hard as a rock when you walk on it and has brown spots, it’s probably due to soil compaction. Too much foot traffic—walking and playing—on the lawn causes soil compaction.
While you don’t want to discourage anyone from enjoying your lawn, you should aerate and overseed it every two years to loosen up the soil and allow it to breathe again.
Warm season lawns should be aerated in the spring and cool season lawns in the fall.
How Brinly’s Lawn Care Equipment Helps You with Healing Brown Spots in Your Yard
Now you know the five causes of brown spots on your lawn. You’re also equipped to tackle the causes to promote healing brown spots in your yard.
We have dethatchers and two types of aerators at Brinly to help you restore your turfgrass to health.
We have many other lawn and garden products, including new lawn care items, to help you create and maintain a beautiful property throughout the year.
You can buy your next Brinly lawn care and garden products online. If you have questions about your Brinly lawn and garden product, contact our customer service today by filling out our contact form.
Sources:
Extension.PSU.edu, Turfgrass Diseases: Brown Patch (Causal Fungus: Rhizoctonia solani).
HGTV.com, How to Get Rid of Grubs.
LawnLove.com, How to Get Rid of Brown Spots in Your Lawn.
Ibid, How to Get Rid of Chinch Bugs in Your Lawn.
Pennington.com, Why Does My Lawn Have Brown Spots?
