What Height Should I Cut My Grass? Lawn Mowing Tips

mowing is an essential part of your lawn care program so mowing at the proper height is critical to your lawn care success in this video i'm going to be talking all about the proper mowing height so that you can choose what height is best for your lawn let's get out of the weeds [Music] thank you guys for joining me for yet another episode if you guys like these videos please be sure to like and subscribe to this channel if you're not already so if you do a quick search online for what height should i mow my grass you will find a wide variety of answers you will find people that are mowing their cool season grass all the way down at a quarter inch with a real mar all the way to people who recommend mowing your grass all the way up at like four inches and so you can look over there and see man i see literally any height i could possibly imagine and that's what people are recommending so what's important to know is that with cool season grass you can really cut it at any height that you would like and find success it just depends on how much you really want to put into your lawn as a general rule of thumb i find that the sweet spot for somebody just getting into lawn care is to stay between three to three and a half inches for someone that's doing cool season grass so if you're not even sure if you have cool season grass i'll put a chart here on the screen so you can kind of see what type of grass you probably even have depending on where you live in the country the reason i like between the three to three and a half inch mark is because the lower that you mow your grass the more maintenance it's actually going to require uh because of several reasons so first we have the one-third rule and that is every time you mow you never want to take off more than one third of the grass blade so whenever you're cutting your lawn at a little bit of a higher height you actually can have longer time in between your mows and still follow the one third rule so to show this as a real-time example say i want to cut my lawn all the way down at two inches for my cool season grass if i want to keep it at two inches i have to cut my lawn at no later than when it's at three inches because if my lawn is three inches and i take off one third of it it gets me down to two inches so i have about an inch of wiggle room so every time i cut my lawn at two inches it can grow one inch to three inches and then i need to cut it again to follow that one third rule and keep it down at two if i let it go longer than that i would act and i cut it down two i'm actually taking off more than one third of the grass blade at that point so now compare that to keeping my lawn at three inches i can now get keep let my grass grow another half inch so an inch and a half up to four and a half inches before i would need to mow so taking one third off of four and a half inches keeps me down at that three inch mark and so you can see the higher you actually mow your grass actually the less often you have to mow to stay within that one third roll so whenever you're seeing the people on youtube and that who are cutting their grass down at like a quarter inch with a real mower i mean those guys are mowing literally like every day or every other day because you really have to be heavily involved whenever you're cutting your grass at shorter heights so whenever you're cutting your grass a little bit higher it gives you a little bit more wiggle room to really keep your proper mowing practices in place the next reason why i like mowing a little bit taller is because taller grass is going to hold in moisture better and also help to shade itself from the sun and so for cool season in the spring it's not really something we have to worry about as much because their temperatures are just starting to come up again coming out of winter but as we get into the summer temperatures cold season grass really starts to struggle when you start getting to the outside air temperatures of 85 90 degrees outside it'll really start hurting your your grass so if you cut it taller especially as you're going into summer it'd really help your grass hold any moisture it gets from the rain or any irrigation that you put on it and then also with the grass being taller it shades itself a little bit so it helps keep itself a little bit colder so for me personally a lot of times when i'm going into like july august and september a lot of times i'll even raise my mower height all the way up to that four inch mark i just to help my lawn and relieve a little bit of that stress the next critical component of mowing properly is how often should you mow so to keep yourself within that one third rule you want to get out and mow usually around every three to four days to prevent taking too much grass off because you're not going to actually come out and measure how much your grass has grown in between mowings so if you stick between that every three to four day mark you always ensure that you stay within the one-third rule and keep your grasp from getting too stressed out now i understand some of you may be in the habit of mowing once a week or once every two weeks but i want you to try to get out of bad mowing practices and start really developing good habits for your lawn that's going to allow your lawn to thrive and so now i understand we all have lives and so sometimes we're our schedules just don't allow us to mow every three or four days and so if that's the case that's completely fine just know that whenever you go back out there to mow say you go on vacation or something and you come back in a week if you go out to maul raise the height of your mower a notch or two and then slowly work it back down to the proper height that you'd like to keep your grass one of the worst things that you can do for your lawn is to mow it low let it go a couple weeks and then keep it at that setting and hack it all off your grass will get really stressed out and in turn you will see a lot of browning in your lawn from doing that so anytime you don't have the opportunity to mow your grass that often make sure you raise the height and slow walk it down i actually accidentally messed up my lawn going into the fall last year and i'll show you some pictures i was trying to lower my my lawn a little bit as i was leading up to doing some aeration in the fall and i went down too quickly and you can see my lawn was not happy with me um i'll show you a picture here on the screen where what it looked like before and then shortly after me hacking it all off you can see how brown my lawn turned i actually did a quick video on it uh in the fall where it said what is i think i titled it what's wrong with my grass or something of that sort now lastly you may be wondering well all these numbers are well and good but i have no idea when i'm on the height setting of what height it's actually cutting my grass so you can kind of figure this out a few ways one you can just do an online search of the mower that you have and you should be able to find pull up the user manual uh or just on maybe on the company's website and it'll tell you what the mower heights are in general most push mowers that you're going to buy in your stores their top cutting height is going to be somewhere between three and three quarters inches all the way up to about four and a quarter inches somewhere around that i know personally for my honda mower its top cutting height is at four inches and so if you don't want to go through the time to find exactly what it is just kind of a good rule of thumb i like to follow is to keep the mower height either on the highest setting or the second to highest setting for cool season grass and so a few days ago i actually got the opportunity during a nice day to get out and mow my lawn for the first time this year as i put up the pictures on the screen here you can see man it makes such a huge difference to just get out and get that fresh cut on your grass because you can see with my lawn man it looks so much better and so if you're worried about how your lawn looks just go out there and give it a nice fresh cut to get it started and it'll make you feel so much better about how your lawn looks mowing is what we do more often than anything in our lawn care program and so it has some of the biggest impact on how your grass is going to look you can fertilize and water good and keep weeds out but if you're not mowing properly your lawn still isn't going to get to give you the results that you're looking for and so i hope you guys will join me next time when we get out of the weeds and into a beautiful lawn [Music]

Channel: Out of the Weeds Lawn Care

Views: 10,447

Keywords: lawn care, lawn care tips, lawn mowing, Mowing Height, Ugly Lawn

Id: UgFXnwftRXc

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2022