6 Tips For Perfecting Your Lawn Care

Lawn care takes a lot of hard work, but it’s one of your top responsibilities as a homeowner. If you want your lawn to impress your neighbors, and look beautiful year-round, you’ll need to put in the effort. For those who are only happy with the top results, here are six must-know tips for perfecting your lawn care:

1. Keep Your Soil Healthy

Testing your soil is absolutely essential if you want your lawn to be healthy year-round. Without healthy soil, you’ll run into many problems, both in terms of your lawn’s health and beauty. By doing soil tests, and replacing soil that’s heavily damaged, you make your lawn much stronger. Depending on the type of grass your lawn is made up of, you may need to replace soil fairly frequently. By hiring a lawn care service in your area, you can ensure that you’re handling your lawn’s soil needs correctly.

2. Water Early in the Day

Watering your lawn is incredibly important, especially if you live in an area with droughts or other inclement weather conditions. However, knowing when to water is just as important. Many people make the mistake of not only watering when it’s hot outside but right after they’ve mowed their lawns as well. When you do this, the grass has not healed enough from the mowing session to respond fully to your watering job, which wastes time and money. Additionally, if you mow in particularly hot weather, the water will be likely to evaporate before it can properly soak into your topsoil (which can cause even more issues over time).

3. Avoid Over-Mowing

Mowing is a relaxing routine for many homeowners. For this reason, they like to mow (and they like to mow a lot). However, over-mowing can be highly destructive for your grass. If you want to mow in a particularly healthy manner, you need to only mow once a week. In some climates, where grass grows more slowly, you may even want to restrict mowing to only once every two weeks. If you’re uncertain about the best timeline in your area, you should contact a lawn care pro near you to seek some advice. Doing so will help you keep your grass stronger, and in need of less year-round care. Additionally, by not over-mowing, you will end up spending much less time and money on needed mower maintenance in the future.

4. Aerate Your Lawn Properly

Letting your lawn breathe is key to allowing it to thrive. Aerating happens when you add extra holes and air pathways into your lawn’s topsoil. Depending on the type of soil you have, this process can look fairly different, so be sure to look up the details for your soil type before aerating. Doing soil tests, and other soil maintenance, before the aerating tasks is important as well. Once again, contacting a trusted lawn care pro can help you learn the correct way to do a task before you take on said task yourself. If you want to be a fully responsible homeowner, when it comes to lawn care, it’s a good idea to get into this habit early.

5. Keep Leaves Raked

Few things can damage lawns faster than leaving wet (or even dry) piles of leaves laying around for extended periods. Wet leaves can severely damage your grass, and still valuable moisture from your lawn as well. Both wet and dry leaves can attract pests if left to rot, and these pests can end up doing damage that will cost you a pretty penny in the long run. Lastly, if you live in a dry climate, leaving dry leaves on your lawn is a major fire hazard. In some locales, you can even be hit with high, harsh fines for leaving dry leaves laying out and about during hot, drought-like conditions.

6. Control Pests

Speaking of pests, there are more pests out there that can harm your lawn’s health and beauty than you might think. When it comes to insects, you’ll need to use safe insecticides, and dethatching processes to keep pests away. When it comes to crabgrass and other plant-based pests, you’ll need to use specialized weed removal to get the job done. If you have a moderate to severe pest infestation, you should always call a professional to handle the removal job. Doing so ensures that the job is fully and thoroughly taken care of. To an untrained eye, knowing whether or not you’ve effectively handled your lawn care pest problem can be incredibly difficult.