Your Yard Clean-Up Guide:
Taking the Guesswork Out of Fall Lawn Care
Autumn leaves look pretty in the fall, but a thick blanket of them will smother your lawn. Removing leaves, twigs, and seed pods keeps turfgrass breathing and building strong roots. Other seasonal tasks—such as winter fertilizer and the last mow—set your lawn up for a successful spring.
In this blog post, you’ll learn more about
- Why Fall Lawn Care Is Essential
- 5 Leaf Mulching Tips & Protecting Fall Grass
- Complete Seasonal Yard Maintenance with Winter Fertilizer.
- Let’s start with why these fall lawn tasks are necessary in the first place.
Why Fall Lawn Care Is Essential
Fall lawn care is vital because it’s not only cleaning up your yard right now to improve curb appeal, but it’s also preparing your turfgrass for next spring.
Practices, such as aeration, overseeding, and adding winterizer (fertilizer that helps your turfgrass grow strong root systems), set up your lawn for spring success. Not only will you have greener, denser turf, but it’ll be healthy as well.
Fall lawn care also includes preventing diseases and pests. For example, leaf clean-up not only tidies up your yard, but it also prevents turfgrass diseases. Additionally, you’re removing a hiding spot for pests, such as moles and voles, preventing them from eating your turfgrass roots over the winter.
One of the most important fall tasks is managing leaves before they pile up.
Learn more: Boost Your Curb Appeal This Fall in South Central PA with Pro Landscaping
5 Leaf Mulching Tips & Protecting Fall Grass
Removing leaves or mulching them using your mower allows more sunlight, oxygen, and water to enter your lawn throughout the fall and winter.
Leaf removal is one of the most time-consuming fall lawn care jobs. Here are five leaf mulching tips you can use to get leaves off your turfgrass before winter:
- Use your mower’s mulching function to chop up leaves and grass clippings into small pieces so they easily dissolve into the ground. Mulched leaves and grass clippings can give up to a 25% nitrogen boost.
- Leaving whole leaves on the lawn can lead to soil diseases. Instead, shred them and use the pieces as mulch in your garden beds.
- Buy or rent a lawn sweeper, an attachment for your garden tractor or a machine that you push throughout your lawn, to sweep up leaves, pinecones, twigs, and other yard debris. When the bag gets full, dump it on your compost pile. Raking leaves can take hours or even an entire weekend to finish the job unless you have a small lot. It’s good exercise, but if you have back issues, hand raking may not be for you.
- Hire a professional landscaping company to clean up your leaves and dispose of them for you.
- After leaf clean-up, mow one final time before the first freeze, which is typically in early November.
Set your mower blades lower so that you cut your lawn to 1½ – 2 ½” to prevent snow mold from forming over the winter. Long grass gets matted down under a snow pile, which can cause this fungal disease to develop in late winter and early spring.
With mowing wrapped up, the last step in seasonal yard maintenance is applying winter fertilizer.
Read more: Top 5 Fall Landscape Maintenance Tips to Prepare for Winter
Complete Seasonal Yard Maintenance with Winter Fertilizer
Your seasonal yard maintenance isn’t complete until you apply winter fertilizer to your lawn.
Winter fertilizer, also called winterizer, is the most important fertilizer of the year. If you don’t invest in a lawn care program, you want to apply winterizer during the fall season.
Winterizer is a slow-release fertilizer with a higher potassium (potash) concentration, designed to toughen grass cell walls against bursting during freeze-thaw cycles that occur in winter and early spring.
Winterizer also encourages your turf to develop deeper root growth and builds disease resistance, which results in a faster green-up in the spring.
After it receives winterizer, your turfgrass will store nutrients and energy reserves to survive Pennsylvania’s cold winters.
As you can see, fall lawn care covers a lot more than just raking leaves.
Trust Tomlinson Bomberger for All of Your Fall Lawn Care Needs
You want a lawn that looks green and dense without the stress of fall clean-up and fertilizing. Trust Tomlinson Bomberger’s expertise, professional equipment, and technicians to handle every seasonal task.
Schedule your fall yard clean-up with Tomlinson Bomberger today, and head into winter confident your lawn will bounce back green and strong next spring.
