While you’re all excited about summer, chasing down the ice cream truck and happily wiggling your bare toes, your lawn is saying, “yikes.”
Sure, summer is great, but it’s kind of stressful for your grass, from searing sun to pesky weeds to your high expectations that it looks green and lush all the time. (You’re kind of demanding that way.)
Want to keep your lawn healthy in the summer heat? Follow these important summer lawn care tips:
1. Don’t Water Every Day
It’s tempting, we know. The Idaho sun is beating down, and you swear you hear your precious lawn gasping, “water, waterrrrrrr!”
Be strong — and strategic about watering, so your grass gets the water it needs, but not too much.
Early morning is the best time — it’s still cool, so all that valuable water won’t evaporate in the hot sun.
And don’t think your grass needs watering every day. It doesn’t — even in summer. Water too often, and it encourages shallow, needy roots.
Water less often but deeply, and roots will grow deeper and healthier, to help keep your lawn green in summer.
2. Fertilizing, Times Three, to Keep Your Lawn Green in Summer
Summer makes your lawn hungry.
Lots of homeowners neglect their lawn’s fertilizer needs, only applying it once or twice a year.
Your hungry Idaho lawn needs three fertilizer treatments during the growing season to stay green and healthy during all those backyard barbecues and lazy summer weekends on the patio.
When to fertilize your lawn in summer? Plan on mid-May, around the end of June, and in early to mid-August. Staying on top of fertilizer is one of the most important summer lawn care tips.
The right fertilizer blend can give your lawn exactly the mix of quick-release and slow-release fertilizer it needs, delivering both immediate and long-term results to keep your lawn green and healthy.
For your summer lawn fertilizing schedule, use 25 percent quick-release and 75 percent slow-release fertilizer to keep your lawn green in summer but avoid big growth spikes so you’re not constantly mowing.
3. Don’t Let Weeds Take Over
Weeds love summer, when you’re so distracted by vacation, frosty drinks on the patio, and which flip-flops to wear, they think you might not notice them.
Show them who’s boss and keep your lawn healthy in the summer heat, when weeds thrive.
You’ll need a multi-step process here, with weed control that includes pre-emergent weed treatment in the spring, to battle weeds before they sprout; broadleaf applications to hit dandelions and clover; and spot treatments when pesky intruders sneak in.
4. Mow Tall to Keep Your Lawn Green in Summer
This is an easy one, but among the top summer lawn care tips.
Cutting your grass too short stresses the grass, especially in the heat of summer, and makes it more susceptible to damage from insects and disease.
Never cut off more than a third of the grass blade at any one time.
5. Keep Your Mower Blades Sharp
A dull mower blade shreds the grass instead of cutting it cleanly. This causes the tips of the grass to die and turn brown. The jagged edges also invite pests and disease.
A sharp blade makes a nice, clean cut, which helps the grass to heal faster. That helps keep your grass green in summer.
6. Watch for Lawn Fungus
The humidity of summer makes your lawn more susceptible to fungus. So keep an eye out for it — it can strike really fast.
You can wake up one warm morning, look out at your lawn and see entire areas have turned yellow or brown.
Lawn damaged by fungus will often have a brown dead spot where the grass has died, but a lighter yellow-ish-brown ring around that where the fungus is spreading.
The type of disease will determine the course of treatment.
Applying fungicides can help treat many lawn diseases. A professional lawn care technician can help with diagnosis and proper treatment.
Is Your Lawn Ready for a New Best Friend?
That’s a lot of important summer lawn care tips to remember. How are you supposed to perfect your mango margaritas if you’re tending to your lawn all summer?
Why not leave it to us? Then you can spend summer doing fun stuff, like not worrying about your lawn.
Choose an Idaho Falls or Boise professional lawn care service that bundles your yard’s most-needed treatments into one convenient, no-fuss, six-visit plan that includes everything your lawn needs to grow healthy and green, including weed control and grub control that’s perfectly timed throughout the year.
Fertilizing, weed control, grub control. Done.
Got a few minutes? That’s all you need to get started.
Fill out the form on this page.
Call us at (208) 656-9131.
Or read more about our services.
Then kick back and relax in your healthy, thriving yard.
Image Source: Sprinkler Head
