A healthy green lawn is understandably a source of pride for many homeowners. If you love taking care of your yard, then you need the following tips to grow a thick, healthy one this season.
You Don’t Need to Hire a Pro to Grow a Healthy Lawn
If you have a basic understanding of lawn care, you can grow a healthy green lawn. You need to know five basic steps, though, that keep your turfgrass vibrant for the entire growing season.
You also need the right lawn care and garden equipment to get the job done. And you need the right fertilizer to feed nutrients into the ground to encourage deep root growth.
The five tips for a healthy lawn include
- Mowing at the right height
- Watering your lawn only one to two times a week
- Letting your lawn go dormant when it’s hot and dry
- Putting down the right amount of fertilizer once a year
- Aerating your lawn once a year.
5 Tips for a Healthy Lawn
There are five tips you need to employ in your lawn care regimen to produce hardy green grass during the growing season. These jobs are easy, but they do take time to complete correctly.
All of these tips can help or hurt your turfgrass, depending on how you how much you know about lawn care. Here are those five tips for a healthy lawn this summer:
- Mowing: In your grandparents’ day, it was popular to scalp a yard. Everyone in your neighborhood kept their lawns clipped, so it didn’t look weedy or out-of-control.
Not anymore. It’s better to allow your lawn to be a little longer so turfgrass shields the soil from getting too hot and prevents weed seeds from germinating. Plus, it helps your turfgrass stay free from disease and insects.
- Irrigation: You don’t want to drown or lightly sprinkle your turf when you water it. Instead, you should water it one to two times a week. Give it a deep soaking—1” to 2” of water, or don’t water it if there was 1” to 2” of rain during the week.
If you have an irrigation system, test it to make sure that the sprinkler heads are covering your lawn. You can set out cans in different zones to collect water. Turn on the water in each zone for 15 minutes.
Measure the water depth in each can and add all the measurements together. Take that number and divide it by the number of cans you used to collect water. The final count tells you how much water your sprinkler system puts out in a 15-minute period.
If these numbers seem too low or too high, adjust your sprinkler and rotary heads as well as check your water pressure. If you need assistance, go to your sprinkler system manufacturer’s website to troubleshoot your problem.
Are you growing a new lawn from scratch? Then, here are five hacks to help you.
- Dormancy: When you start to see your turf brown up because it has been hot and dry, leave it be. It goes against your grain, but your lawn does better if it’s allowed to go dormant.
Going dormant protects the turf crowns, and your lawn is still alive underground. Your yard grass can go for several months without water. However, you can water it every 2-4 weeks if you think it needs it.
- Fertilizer: You may be tempted to go to your local garden center and buy bags of fertilizer. But don’t do it. Instead, get a soil test kit first to see what’s missing in your dirt. A soil test also checks the soil’s pH.
You want to have the right ratio of nutrients in your soil. You also have to consider your local municipality’s ordinances regarding phosphorous or nitrogen.
Use your soil test results to guide your fertilizing plan. Ideally, your fertilizer ratio should be 3:1:2 (nitrogen is the first number, phosphorous is the second number, and potassium is the third number).
You should get a mix of 30% – 50% of slow release fertilizer mixed with 70% – 50% quick release fertilizer. This mixture will give you a fast green up in the spring while slowly releasing nutrients to promote soil health over a four to six week period.
Here are five additional tips to help you with your lawn fertilization project:
Tip 1: If you have a small lawn, you need a drop spreader. If you have a large yard, you want a broadcast spreader.
Watch our push spreaders in action with this video.
Tip 2: You should go for organic fertilizer to feed the soil and promote a vibrant eco-system underground.
Tip 3: You can spread fertilizer by hand to get into tight spaces, around corners and other areas where your spreader can’t reach.
Tip 4: Don’t spread fertilizer along lawn edges, near water, or in vegetable and flowerbeds. Otherwise, the fertilizer will leach into storm water drains and local waterways.
Tip 5: You should only fertilize one time a year. However, if you want a perfect lawn, you can fertilize three to four times a year. Be careful not to burn your lawn grass, though, by using too much fertilizer.
- Aeration: Invest in an aerator to pull plugs of dirt out of the ground once a year. Aeration relieves soil compaction, loosens up thatch and prevents disease.
When you aerate your lawn (either in the spring time or fall) you want your aerator’s tines to go 3” deep into the soil to pull up plugs. You want to pass over your lawn until you have eight plugs per square foot.
It’s best to aerate your soil when it’s dry to avoid creating a muddy mess in your yard.
Watch our aerator-spreader in action in this video.
Let Brinly-Hardy Help You Maintain a Healthy Lawn this Summer
Brinly-Hardy manufactures lawn care and garden attachments to help you maintain a beautiful lawn. In addition to our aerators and spreaders, we also produce
You can find Brinly-Hardy Lawn Care and Garden Attachments at these retailers:
If you have questions about Brinly-Hardy lawn care and garden attachments, call our customer service at 877-728-8224, or you can fill out our contact form.
Our customer service department is open from Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET, and on Fridays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET.
Sources:
“Wiki How: Get and Maintain a Healthy Lawn.”
