Do you want a professional-looking lawn? If you love working on your property, you can learn DIY lawn care secrets from the pros for a beautiful yard.
It will require your time and sweat equity, though, because maintaining a healthy, green lawn takes time. Consider how the farmers tend their fields. They must plant at a particular time, till the soil to receive seeds, and add fertilizer for healthy soil to grow crops.
When you care for your lawn, it’s the same thing. You need to nurture the turf by planting the right grass seed for your climate, aerating the soil, and adding fertilizer to help your soil grow healthy grass.
9 Pro Tips for a Lawn Care Plan
To practice lawn care, you need to develop a plan. A DIY lawn care plan is a lawn maintenance calendar.
But it also depends on where you live in the U.S. For example, if you look at the lawn maintenance calendar, you’ll see the northern half of the U.S. is in blue, and the southern half is in green.
The northern half of the U.S. has cool season lawns, which means that lawn maintenance starts in March and runs through October. And the southern half has warm season grasses, where lawn maintenance begins in February and runs through October.
Watch more: How to Assemble Brinly Spike Aerator and Drop Spreader Combo
Cool season lawns start with pre-emergent weed control and reseeding, while warm season lawns start with core aeration and overseeding. The cool and warm season lawn maintenance calendars run opposite each other throughout the growing season.
Here are nine pro tips for DIY lawn care. Keep in mind that all of these maintenance jobs need to be done—but when you do them depends on where you live.
- Using the right grass seed for your lawn: You must consider what grass seed will work for your yard. Each property has micro-climates.
Your lawn is unique to you. For example, your next-door neighbor has different micro-climates than you do—even if you live on the same street.
If you have shade, slopes, and full sun areas, you need grass seed that will thrive in those conditions. For example, some southern states can use tall fescue as shade-loving grass, while they use zoysia grass, a warm season grass, for full sun.
Likewise, cool season grasses have different varieties that work in different conditions. For example, fine fescue mixed with tall fescue do well in the shade for cool season lawns. Homeowners with sunny yards will use a Kentucky blue variety, another cool season turf, for full sun.
Use our Brinly Fertilizer Spreaders to sow grass seed in your yard this year. Our lawn rollers tamp down seed into the soil for faster germination.
- Gather soil samples for a soil test: Before going out to buy fertilizer and compost, ensure that you test the soil.
You can get soil test kits at your favorite garden center or retail box store or send your samples to an extension soil testing site. Your test results will tell you what nutrients are missing in the soil, the fertilizer type, and any necessary soil amendments.
Take that information with you when you buy fertilizer and soil amendments. Ensure you follow the manufacturer’s directions on the back of the bag before putting it down in your yard. Brinly’s fertilizer spreaders help you put down soil amendments and fertilizer.
Read more: Lawn Care Starter Kit: How to Start Lawn Care with a Kit
- Taking control of weeds: Most experts will tell you that having a completely weed-free lawn is impossible. You can reduce the number of weeds in your yard using synthetic or organic weed control.
One DIY lawn care tip for the early spring, you want to use pre-emergent weed control if you have cool season grass. Meanwhile, you’ll wait until late summer or early fall to put down pre-emergent weed control on your warm season lawn.
You also have to deal with broadleaf weeds, such as henbit, creeping Charlie, dandelions, and plantains. Our lawn sprayer will help you target any broadleaf weeds on your lawn.
- Insect control: You may also need to deal with pests that eat your turf or cause disease. Grubs are a big issue in springtime and again in late summer. Depending on where you live, you may need to deal with armyworms, sod webworms, and cutworms.
There are organic and synthetic pest controls on the market to control grubs, armyworms, sod webworms, and cutworms. Always follow the manufacturer’s directions on the bag.
- Lawn diseases: Turf is susceptible to fungal diseases, especially the more south you go. Humid, wet lawns can develop brown patch, red thread, powdery mildew, snow mold, and fairy ring.
There are fungicides for some of these diseases, but you can also control them by using smart lawn care practices.
- Mowing your lawn: Did you know how you mow your lawn affects its health? Cutting with dull blades in the middle of the afternoon stresses the grass.
Instead, you want to ensure your mower blades are sharpened each spring. You also want to cut your turf in the morning or later in the evening when temperatures cooled.
You only want to take off the top third of the grass blades. Allowing your lawn to grow taller keeps the turf healthy and thick, crowding out weeds.
- Watering the lawn: Knowing how and when to water your lawn will affect its health.
Another DIY lawn care tip is that your grass only needs about 1”-2” of water per week (including any rainfall) and that deep irrigation once or twice a week is better than a daily sprinkle?
You also may want to install an in-ground irrigation system where you set the time and amount of water for your lawn. Plus, modern sprinkler systems come with weather and moisture sensors that turn off the system when the soil has enough moisture.
Today’s in-ground lawn sprinklers are controlled through Bluetooth and an app on your mobile device so that you control when and how much water your lawn gets each week.
- Core aeration and overseeding: You only have to aerate your lawn every two years unless you have compacted soil.
If you have a warm season lawn, you aerate your lawn in the spring using an aerator with spikes and plugs that pull up the soil to help it breathe.
You’ll also overseed your lawn at this time because warm season grasses grow rapidly in hot summer temperatures.
If you have a cool season lawn, you’ll aerate your lawn in the early fall, and then you’ll overseed and tamp it down with a lawn roller.
- Dethatching your lawn: Certain grass types develop a thick layer of thatch, the middle portion of dead stems and leaves between the live turf on top and the soil line.
A lawn dethatcher pulls up the excess thatch so your lawn can receive air, water, and light. On years when you’re not aerating, you should dethatch your yard.
Use these maintenance jobs for your DIY lawn care calendar.
Let Brinly Lawn Care and Garden Attachments Be a Part of Your Lawn Care Arsenal
If you love taking care of your lawn like a farmer takes care of their crops, then you need Brinly Lawn Care and Garden Attachments to take your yard from the average Joe to a lawn care pro!
We carry other lawn care attachments to make your yard rock this year:
- Lawn sweepers
- Tow spreaders
- Push spreaders
- Dump carts
- ZTR attachments.
Take your DIY lawn care up a notch with Brinly attachments!
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 dialing 877-728-8224 or filling out our contact form.
