Maintaining a lawn is hard. Combating weeds, moss, and dead grass seems like a full-time job. I’m going to share some lawn care tips to help you enjoy a lush green lawn. You’ll learn how to maintain a lawn by following just a few steps.
I live in the beautiful Pacific Northwest and with that comes with its own battles of long dark winters, very wet spring and fall, and very dry summers. We are constantly combatting moss and weeds in our yard.
Other ways to enjoy your home
Preparing The Area
Firstly, it’s best to ensure that your lawn is ready for seeding or over seeding. It can be very difficult to ensure that your lawn is ready, especially if you have external influences that are very annoying.
If you have animals (like cats and dogs) that like to make their mess on the grass. You may have mole mounds in your yard. Getting rid of moles doesn’t have to be an arduous task.
Other things you may need to do to prepare the area are:
- Remove weeds
- Thatch out moss and dead grass
Sowing The Seed
Once you have removed old weeds and grass, you can perform a soil test using a kit you can buy in any garden center. Based on the results, you can improve the soil, if this is necessary. At this point, you can then start to implement fertilizer, by raking it in.
After letting it settle for one week, roll a garden roller over the soil. Once you have chosen the right species of grass, you can install the new lawn. If you are planting seeds, use a lawn spreader, and sow half of the seeds in parallel rows, and the other half at right angles.
Laying sod
If you are using sod, you need to lay this end to end in uneven rows, very much the same as if you were laying bricks. After watering the lawn, you need to not walk on it for at least the first week.
How to Maintain a Lawn
Once it’s grown, maintaining it is key. You don’t want all that work to go to waste. Take a look at these lawn care tips to help you maintain your lawn.
Watering the lawn
When it comes to watering the lawn, either do it in the early morning or the late evening, as this minimizes water loss due to evaporation. In my experience I’ve found watering in the evening is best during the hot summer days. This allows the moisture to stay without evaporating too quickly.
Mowing your lawn
When mowing the lawn, start off with the highest setting on your lawn mower, this helps with root growth. The stronger the roots the more lush your lawn will be.
Mow the lawn in a different pattern than the last time you did it. This helps the grass grow evenly.
Using a lawn mower with a sharp blade is also really important so you aren’t ripping the grass and pulling on the roots.
Mulching grass clippings
When you are mowing your lawn regularly and not letting it get too long mulching is does a lot more good than harm. I will allow my grass clippings to stay on the lawn so vital nutrients will go back into the soil.
However, you don’t want to allow big clumps of grass to lay on top of the freshly cut grass. Doing a good ranking using a leaf rake will allow the grass clippings to evenly distribute.
I will bag my clippings before I fertilize my yard though and go into fertilizing below.
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Lawn fertilizer
Use the right fertilizer to help maintain the health of your lawn. I use this fertilizer on my lawn. It’s organic so I don’t have to worry about my vegetable garden or all of my fruit trees being poisoned by chemicals.
Maintaining constant care of your lawn is the best way to keep it looking healthy. Now you’ve been able to give it the color and depth that makes the rest of your garden look great, make sure you keep on top of it.
Ongoing lawn maintenance
Every six months or so, undertake a thorough inspection, and, depending on the weather over the last six months, you may want to put more fertilizer on it, or reseed certain areas.
It doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task, but if you want your lawn to look fantastic, you need to put a bit of time into making sure it looks great now.
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