It’s National Lawn Care Month: 7 Lawn Care Tips for Beautiful Spring Grass
How green is your lawn this spring?
April is National Lawn Care Month, when trusted pros share lawn care awareness tips and tricks to help homeowners like you maintain beautiful spring yards.
In this blog post, you’ll learn the following:
- What You Need to Know About Spring Lawn Maintenance
- 7 Must-Do Lawn Care Tips Every Homeowner Needs to Know
- The Pros of Hiring a Lawn Care Company for Seasonal Lawn Care.
What You Need to Know About Spring Lawn Maintenance
Do you know that spring lawn maintenance tasks can affect your entire weekend?
Seasonal lawn care starts when the temperatures warm up, and all the snow has melted in your yard. You begin with lawn cleanup, where you rake up leaves and wake up your turfgrass.
Before fertilizing your lawn this spring, you must know which nutrients are missing from the soil. A soil test requires you to take various soil samples throughout your lawn, put them in a ziplock bag, and send them to your local Penn State Extension Office for testing.
You also need to overseed bare patches, topdress seeded areas, and apply weed control to prevent grassy weeds from popping up.
Later in the spring, you’ll need to apply broadleaf weed control to kill dandelions, burdock, and chickweed from taking over your yard.
Next, you’ll use pest control to eliminate grubs, army webworms, and other bugs that ruin lawns. You’ll need to work on seasonal lawn care as well as mow and edge your lawn almost every weekend in the spring and summer.
Read more: Tomlinson Bomberger Lawn Care Programs: Which One Is Right for You?
7 Must-Do Lawn Care Tips Every Homeowner Needs to Know
Seasonal lawn care means thinking like a farmer to grow a healthy, weed-free lawn. You start with soil health, address diseases and pests, and prepare your lawn for spring growth.
Here are seven must-do lawn care tips you need to know for successful spring lawn maintenance:
- Test your soil to determine what nutrients your lawn needs to grow healthy grass.
- Your soil test results will help you buy turf fertilizer for a robust lawn that meets your soil’s needs.
- Your soil test will also indicate whether your soil is sour (acidic) or sweet (alkaline). Most PA lawns are sour and need lime to balance the soil’s pH so that grass can grow.
- Start a fertilizing schedule. It’s best to use slow-release or controlled-release fertilizer so nutrients are rolled out over time rather than all at once.
- Follow all manufacturer directions on the fertilizer bag. Too much or too little fertilizer will not benefit your lawn.
- Apply pre-emergent weed control to stop crabgrass and other grassy weeds when soil temperatures warm to 50-55°F for five days or when your forsythia shrub blooms.
- Seasonal lawn care also includes mowing with sharp blades and in different directions to ensure a healthy lawn, as well as trimming along fences and hardscapes.
While you may not mind mowing and trimming your lawn every week, doing full-scale spring lawn maintenance will quickly get old with your busy family.
Hiring an award-winning lawn care company will save you time and worry. You’ll rest assured that your lawn will receive everything it needs to grow green, dense, and robust.
However, you must develop healthy lawn habits. Between professional visits, you’re responsible for seasonal lawn care, such as watering the grass after a fertilization treatment or mowing your lawn.
The Pros of Hiring a Lawn Care Company for Seasonal Lawn Care
While you may think you’re saving money by not hiring a lawn care company, you’ll be wrong if you don’t understand turfgrass science.
For example, you may think that adding extra fertilizer will help your turfgrass grow. However, you’re putting it at risk for fertilizer burn and possibly death when there hasn’t been any rain during the summer.
You may also water your lawn every evening, or if you have an in-ground sprinkler system, you may let it run for hours at night. However, overwatering your grass encourages fungal growth, and your turf will develop shallow roots.
If you ruin your lawn with too much fertilizer, the wrong grass variety, and overwatering your lawn, you’ll need to pay more to a lawn care company to rehabilitate your turfgrass.
It’s better to hire a local lawn care company to take care of the various tasks that grass needs to grow dense, green, and healthy.
Experience a Green, Healthy Lawn This Spring with Help from Tomlinson Bomberger
Looking for a great deal on our lawn care programs? When you sign up for one of our spring lawn maintenance programs, you get a free lawn application and soil test.
For even more savings, bundle our lawn care and pest control services with $50 off your lawn care program’s last visit and save $50 off the initial pest visit with an extra 10% off each program.
Got questions about your spring lawn maintenance program? Call us today at 717-399-1991 or fill out our contact form.
Sources:
LoveYourLandscape.org, The 5 Most Common Lawn Care Mistakes Homeowners Make.
Ibid, Mowing.
Ibid, Repair Your Yard from Winter’s Damage.
