How to Do Lawn Care in Summer

After months of mild weather to help a lawn recover from the winter chill, it can quickly become a struggle to keep your grass healthy and green in the scorching heat and limited water supply. Lawn care may seem daunting and stressful for both you and your turf, but it doesn’t have to be a difficult process. Knowing how to properly tend to your lawn in the summertime is essential to keeping your yard beautiful all season long.

Feed Routinely

If you want to, you can apply fertilizer to your lawn every 6 to 8 weeks. Routinely feeding during the summer can help strengthen and invigorate your turf to better endure the heat and replenish its nutrients. Just be careful to avoid over-fertilizing. If your lawn goes dormant (a common summer reaction to heat and drought when water usage is reduced as the turfgrass fixates its resources on the roots) applying extra fertilizer will work in tandem with the high temperatures to “burn” your lawn out. Should your lawn enter dormancy, wait to feed again until it greens up again in cooler weather.

Set Your Mower High

One of the biggest mistakes homeowners can make in the summertime is cutting their grass too short when they mow. Cutting the lawn at a neat 1 to 2 inches length may look especially sleek, but over time it can lead to serious stress on your turf, weakening or even killing the grass and possibly opening the floodgates to diseases or weeds making their way in. Instead of giving your lawn a crew cut, opt for setting your mower to a higher length such as 3 or 3 ½ inches. Also, be sure to sharpen your mower blade regularly. A dull blade will shred the grass rather than cut it, creating a jagged tip that quickly loses moisture.

Water Wisely

The best tip for watering your lawn in the summertime is to water in the morning. As the day goes on and the temperature rises, your lawn will quickly lose water due to evaporation if you water in the middle of the afternoon. Watering in the morning between 5 and 10 a.m. will ensure that the soil has adequate time to absorb the moisture before the sun and heat can dry it out. Lawns need at least one inch of water per week (possibly more when the temperature skyrockets) and must be watered deeply and regularly. However, you don’t want to oversaturate the soil, as this will cause it to become unfertile. Find a balance between what is too much and too little for your turf.

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