Lawn Care for Beginners
Lawn envy is what
occurs when you see all of those beautiful lawns and know that yours isn’t one of them. Developing and growing a healthy lawn does take work, but more than work,
it takes the knowledge to know how to avoid or treat lawn care problems, cultivate healthy grass and plants and feed and maintain the lawn.
Regardless of whether you have a green thumb or struggle to keep any plant alive, you can learn how to have a great looking lawn that will make others look at your
property and turn green with envy.
Setting Your Lawn Up For Success
Much like an architect uses a blueprint to build a beautiful home, you need a blueprint to build a beautiful lawn. Everything begins in the planning stage. For this,
you want to figure out what spaces you have to work with.
You can sketch your lawn out by hand or you can use one of those interactive gardening software tools that will help you get your lawn set up. Once you have the layout
of your lawn, you want to identify any trouble spots.
This would be something like poor soil aeration or too much water retention. Identifying trouble spots can help you fix them so that you lay groundwork for a
successful lawn.
Before you can have a lawn that looks great, you want to make sure that you end up with a lawn that you don’t have to work on continually. One of the best ways to get
a lawn that looks good without a lot of effort is to make sure that you have the right kind of grass for your area.
Certain grass types are better for certain areas of the United States than other grasses are. Grass can be warm or cool season grass. The way that you can tell which
is which is determined by how well the grass grows during the warm or cool months of the year.
If you notice that your grass is thicker and taller in the fall, then you probably have cool season grass. Some types of cool season grass are Kentucky bluegrass,
perennial ryegrass and grass from the fescue family.
If you live in a warm climate, then you want warm season grass. Get something like Bermuda grass. This type of grass is easy to grow, tough to destroy and can
survive – even in soil that’s out of balance.
Like many grasses, Bermuda grass will die out when the weather turns colder. What some people choose to do with their lawns is to use a mixture of different grass types
to get a full, healthy appearing lawn.
The climate that you live in will have a big impact on how well your grass grows, so you want to make sure that you choose the grass that’s right for your climate.
If you’re close to the coast, then you would choose a warm season grass.
As you travel up toward the northern states, you’ll find that some states can handle either warm or cool season grasses. But the further north that you live,
it’s better to choose cool season grasses.
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