8 Beginner Friendly Lawn Care Tips For Any Lawn

guys this is Brian Mountz with turpicanic the start of spring everyone wants to get started like right away you want to get the most progress in the fastest amount of time and in the middle of the summer a lot of people around the country are kind of staring starting to feel a little bit bad about their lungs they look kind of sad the beginning of fall most people have no idea what to do and those cool season folks don't even realize that the fall is the best time to do stuff to the lawn and the warm season folk have no idea that the middle of the summer is the best time to start off Spring this year I want to give you some beginner friendly lawn care tips that are going to apply to any lawn no matter where you live in the country or whatever grass you have growing in your front yard and to jump right into it we're going to start with planting grassy you go into any any store you're going to find grass seed for sale in all of the Home and Garden aisles don't buy it if it's the month of March if it's the month of April nobody should be putting grass seed down there are very few exceptions to this Rule now I've done it myself and I've done it successfully but I don't recommend it to anyone even though it looks like you should be doing it because that's what the stores are selling it's the worst time of the year really to put grass seed down now if you live in a Southern Climate a warm climate growing a warm season grass you might put some grass seed down in late May early June it's still not all that common and for cool season Lawns the best time really is at the end of summer towards the late end of August maybe the first of September just hold off on the grass seed instead of putting that grass seed down go to the other product just a little bit further down the aisle the one that looks a little bit more complicated it's called a weed pre-emergent or a Crabgrass Preventer some other labels call it other sorts of things Weed Preventer weed stop this is the kind of thing that you need to put down on your lawn in the early parts of April warm season lines you might even be able to put it down in the month of March this is the stuff that you're going to put on the lawn and it's going to stop the weeds from germinating in your lawn in the spring it's also going to stop grass seed from germinating so you can't do both at the same time if you put the weed preventative down especially if it contains a little bit of potassium the potassium helps your lawn Harden itself off hardens not the right word but it helps strengthen your lawn give it the health and resilience that it needs to get through the longest days of the year of late spring and early summer you might be lucky and find something exactly like this in your local Big Box store but I do have Linked In the description below a couple options that fit this bill they're usually zero zero seven weed preventative options now the next tip which applies to pretty much everyone everywhere is don't apply a weed and feed product early in the spring season there's just no reason to do this weed and feed product tends to have weed killer in it and the weeds aren't really growing until later in the spring and the fertilizer that's going down in the early parts of spring pushes growth that's not necessarily necessary in the first place personally I don't think that it's even worth putting weed and feed down in the spring at all the only time of the year that I think it's reasonable is somewhere around the first of September but that is fodder for another video I already have another video on that topic it is linked in the description below weed and feed products make sense on the label but in the real world when you really consider your options consider what you're putting on the lawn they don't make a lot of sense you're not putting a lot of fertilizer down per application and you're putting weed killers down when they're not necessary sometimes you're putting down weed preventatives in these products after the weeds have already germinated there's a lot of stuff going down on the lawn at the wrong time of the year when you use these products what you should do however is somewhere in the mid to late May time frame you should be applying a grub preventative naughty grub killer a grub preventative grub preventatives are far more palatable to the environment than grub killers are the grub Killers those are the ones that are applied in the fall to kill the grubs that are already like killing off your grass if you put the preventative down at the end of May maybe the first of June then you're not going to have any problems throughout the rest of the year you don't need to eliminate grubs from your lawn we just don't want infestations one side benefit of having fewer grubs in your lawn is you're far less likely to have moles and your lawn that's another problem that's very annoying if you've ever dealt with a mole situation now another tip that's generally perfect for everyone regardless of the grass type regardless of where you live across the country is you should be looking at the way that you attended to your lawn last year and start cutting the grass a little bit taller than you did last year and a little bit more frequently so let's say for instance every time you mow the grass you mowed it down to two inches last year and you cut it once every 10 days or so this year instead of doing two inches cut it down to three inches and mow it every five days this tip alone is going to go way farther than you could ever imagine almost all grass types perform better when they're taller and every grass type out there performs better if every time you mow it you only take a little bit of the leaf blade off so the way that we do that is we have the height of cuts set higher and we cut more often the only caveat to that is some of the warm season grasses like Zoysia and Bermuda and kaikuyu some of these grasses it's best to cut them Ultra short at the very start of the Season regardless though the taller you cut that grass the less frequent you're going to have to mow it but you do want to cut it frequently because that will help it thicken out so there's a little bit of competing interest there but I think you can read between the lines now another tip that works for everyone is to start Watering your lawn with your irrigation system a lot less often but every time you do put your sprinkler system on put it on for a longer period of time this is what we call Deep infrequent watering we want more water to hit the ground on one watering session so that it goes deeper into the ground that's going to promote deeper root development Roots aren't going to be sitting up at the top of the soil surface waiting for water every day they're going to be digging down where the water stays because it's not being lost due to evaporation I have a couple really in-depth videos about watering your lawn more efficiently each of them are linked in the description below I highly recommend going down there and watching at least one of them now for those those of you viewers who have not really tended to your lawn extremely well over the years it's really common at the end of winter starting off a spring season to be looking at your lawn and thinking man there's a whole bunch of like bumps in the lawn some high spots and some low spots is not even there are good times of the year to fix these problems and there are bad times of the year to fix these problems and I'll Define it in one single way only fix these problems during your Peak growing season so if you have a cool season grass you should be fixing these leveling issues in the mid spring when your grass is growing most vigorously naturally you could also get away with it in the early parts of fall but for warm season grasses the best time to do this is in the early parts of the summer or the very end of spring and that June to July time frame these grasses want to grow really really strong they want to push hard during these times a year and that's when we do the leveling work if you attempt to level the lawn at any other point of the year you could have some success but you might have some failures I tried to level my lawn before the acceptable time last year and I got it to work but man I almost killed off my lawn a link to that video down in the description below as well now depending on the time of year that you're watching this video you might have existing weeds in the lawn so to kill those weeds that's what we call a post-emergent weed killing strategy a post-emergent it's post-emergent to kill off a weed after it's been growing the best time of the year or the day or whatever the conditions to kill these weeds is when we've got warm mild temperatures so in the early parts of spring we rarely have temperatures warm enough to have really easy uh weed die off you certainly can apply weed killers to weeds in the early parts of spring in cool weather but they don't kill as efficiently and the same thing goes for the high heat of Summer and on top in the high heat of Summer being an inefficient time of the year to kill these weeds and that has to do with the way that the the weeds uptake the herbicides that we spray onto them applying these products in the middle of the summer during extreme heat can also affect many grass types in a negative sort of light now some warm season grass types can can stand up to that and that's just the way that they synthesize carbohydrates in the Sun and they photosynthesize they can take that stress a lot better but regardless the weeds themselves are going to uptake that herbicide and although they will process it and slowly start dying off it won't be very efficient so the application of weed killing herbicides post-immersions should be done in more mild temperatures towards the late parts of spring and the early parts of fall especially in the early parts of fall before annual weeds go to seed because we don't want those seeds to hit the ground and grow new weeds next year if you haven't killed weeds off by the end of August you got to get on it right away otherwise you're going to have the same exact weed pressure sure next season in the month of July kind of just gotta hand dig them out now a very similar concept to buying grass seed in the middle of the spring is buying fertilizers these home and garden stores they sell tons of fertilizer in the middle of the spring because people get out there after the end of a winter and they just want to repair their line they want to fix their lawns but here's the thing Lawns naturally green up and start growing gangbusters in the springs what we call the spring flush in the spring if you want to be treating your lawn applying anything to it the best thing to be doing is to be applying bio stimulants and soil amendments to your lawn things that are going to increase the health of your grass and push deeper more robust root development in your lawn nitrogen is necessary but low doses of nitrogen are better than high doses of nitrogen in the spring in almost all scenarios almost I do have videos where I show the application of heavy nitrogen applications in the spring for the purpose of fixing a lawn I'll link to a video down in the description below if that describes your needs but typically you're going to be putting down lower doses of nitrogen and boosting root development now have an entire premium root development guide which I've linked to down in the description below it's a comprehensive mixed media web page and the majority of everything on that web page is very hard to find here on YouTube it's certainly not in any all-encompassing video if you're not going to do anything else I suggest you do at least that one thing however if you just want to sit back and relax and watch some casual lawn guidance on why seek help is so important for root development then take a look at the video up here which is all about how the cytokinins NC kelp can help your grass put on deeper more substantial resilient root systems a little bit of this knowledge goes a long way to taking your good looking lawn and making it a great lawn or taking your bad lawn and making it look good for the first time ever

Channel: Turf Mechanic

Views: 84,716

Keywords: grass, lawncare, gardening, lawnmower, lawn mower, lawn care, thatch

Id: P1xwBxqQloY

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023