Your lawn can be a thing of beauty and a healthy lawn shines as one of the highlights of your home. Yet, lawns are fickle and grasses are living things that are fairly fragile and require constant care. Keeping up with the needs of your lawn can be a daunting and exhausting task that takes up a large portion of your time. As always, maintenance is much easier than replacement, so if you’ve neglected your lawn, the consequences could be bad, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Setting up a contract with your landscaping company is the best first step you can take. Here’s how neglecting lawn maintenance can ruin your spring landscaping experience in Yorktown, NY.
Your landscaping company delivers professional expertise. Even though it’s mid-winter, setting up a contract should be done soon so that your lawn gets a good head start on the growing season. A site visit will assess the health of your lawn, and the company will plan out necessary treatments for trouble areas as well as routine maintenance going forward. Once the plan is in place, you can rest easy and never worry about your lawn again.
Late Winter/Early Spring
Neglecting soil testing is common, but it’s essential for knowing whether the soil provides adequate nutrients and pH balance for turfgrasses. Without testing, fertilization efforts could do more harm than good as fast-growing weeds could be the beneficiaries of soil pH or nutrient levels that harm grasses. After a site assessment, your lawn care professionals will amend the soil and apply the correct fertilizer. The steps taken during this time will determine the season of growth ahead.
Aeration and dethatching are two spring chores that are often neglected, but neglecting them could mean that water doesn’t reach the roots because of compacted soil or water becomes trapped under a layer of thatch. Either way, whether it’s through starvation or rot, the grass will suffer. Aeration and dethatching will be performed as needed by your lawn care professionals.
The Growing Season
Throughout the late spring and summer, your grass is growing quickly and the focus turns to mowing. Many people mow too short, thinking that this will reduce mowing frequency. However, this almost always backfires. Mowing short leaves the soil vulnerable to drought, and doesn’t leave enough green shoots for adequate photosynthesis. By contrast, mowing too high can cause too much water retention, and rot or disease. Your lawn care professionals will create a mowing schedule.
Many homeowners don’t sharpen mower blades often enough, which tears the grasses and invites disease. Landscaping pros use well-maintained equipment with sharp blades that don’t damage the grass.
Late Autumn/Early Winter
Grass continues growing well into the autumn but you can’t let up on lawn care just because the growing season is drawing to a close. Certain areas of the lawn may have suffered in the summer heat, which means aggressive weed control (before fast-growing seedlings germinate and overwinter) and the right fertilizer to support lawn health through the cold season. Your lawn care professionals will apply a slow-release fertilizer that bolsters root systems as the grasses go into winter dormancy once again.
If you tend to leave fallen leaves on the ground, you could be in for costly lawn repairs. If leaves are allowed to clump and rot, they will suffocate the grasses below. The best solution is to use a mulching mower to add nutrients to the soil (you can ask your lawn care pros to do this) or to rake and remove fallen leaves.
Related: HOW LANDSCAPE CONTRACTORS CAN REDUCE PROPERTY MAINTENANCE REQUIREMENTS IN WESTCHESTER, NY