Handy Man asked:

Prepare For A Lawn Winter Ahead:

Fall Yard Care Projects

The summer holidays are behind us, and the days are getting cooler – now is the perfect time to “think spring” when it comes to caring for your yard. The few extra hours you invest in your yard over the next month or two will pay off next spring and summer in the form of less work and a faster, better-looking lawn.

Here are some yard care projects you can tackle now

What to do with all the leaves you’ve raked

Small piles of leaves can be ground up and run over them with a lawn mower. These small pieces of leaves can provide excellent nutrients to your lawn! Do this several times to create a fine mulch for your lawn. Large amounts of leaves will smother your lawn and hinder healthy growth. Remember to either brown bag them, or recycle them in your own compost pile!

It’s the very best time to seed your lawn

If you are establishing a new lawn or just filling in bare patches, fall is the best time to take on this task to ensure success with your cool season grass. The warm soil combined with cool nights is perfect for grass seed germination. Start with high quality seed that matches what is already growing in your lawn – the local garden center will have mixes appropriate for the colder climate. Disperse the seed with a hand-held seeder or, for larger areas, with your spreader. Be sure you have good soil-to-seed contact by tamping, rolling or lightly pressing the seeds down with the back of a rake. Add a light layer of paper mulch or straw (not hay – it will contain weed seeds!) on top of the area to help conserve moisture. Sprinkle with water immediately and don’t let the soil dry out until the young grass has sprouted. For a complete “how to” on seeding or laying sod, visit our tutorials.

Get rid of those weeds once and for all

If you finally want to get rid of those yellow flowers that pop up every spring, fall is the best time to do it. Dandelions are “broadleaf” weeds that germinate in the fall and drive you crazy in spring. The ideal time to control this type of broadleaf weed ranges from early October in the northern U.S. to late October in the South. You want to apply a broadleaf herbicide as the weeds germinate. A liquid herbicide that you spray on will help ensure contact with the new, small weeds as they germinate. Dandelions are a main target, but this will also control all winter annual weeds that flower in the spring.

Feed your lawn

If you live in the northern half of the United States, you have what is classified as “cool season” grass, and now is the best time to fertilize. In fact, if you were to only fertilize once a year, this is would be the time to do it. The warm soil temperature combined with cooler days, longer nights and rainfall make this the perfect time for lawn growth and recovery. In fall, your lawn spreads horizontally, filling in those thin spots, rather than just growing tall. Feed your lawn with a good nitrogen and potassium combination fertilizer. Watch the video tutorial on how to fertilize at by clicking here.

Draw up your plan for spring

You’ve enjoyed your yard all summer and you know what you like the best and the least. Why not plan your changes now and even start implementing them? Maybe it is time to finally create a stone or wood chip pathway to the kids’ play area where foot traffic has worn out the lawn. Do you need to separate those overgrown perennials? This is the time to remove and replant bulbs and divide clumps of plants and share them with your neighbors. Also, mark your flower beds using permanent marker on paint stir sticks or draw up a “map” of your flowerbeds so you will know what you have next spring and more easily be able to separate the good plants from the weeds. Fall is also a good time to add new trees to your landscape.

Randy Letter asked:

Jumping into a landscaping project can be extremely time consuming and costly. It can be disappoint to put a lot of time and money into a complicated project just to end up not being satisfied with the results. It would be great if there was a way to know before you did your first hole exactly what your perfectly planned project is going to look like.

Fortunately, this is not an impossibility! With landscape software, you can easily play around with all sorts of landscaping options to choose exactly the right combination for your yard. There are many different landscape software options available for purchase, each with varying degrees of flexibility, and realistic graphics. You’ll find the most advanced landscape software at the top of the price range, and there are more economical software packages available as well. It’s all a matter of how much you want to spend and how advanced you want your options to be. No matter what price you pay for your landscape software, it’s a great investment because it will save you thousands of dollars in mistakes you won’t have to make thanks to the software.

If you’re planning on planting a garden, then garden landscape software is invaluable to your process. You can play around with all sorts of flower and plant combinations until you find just the right look for your yard. The process is made easier by the ability to upload your own pictures and work with a replica of your own house and yard. This technology is truly amazing, and is something that couldn’t be dreamed about over a decade ago. You can now make the most important landscaping decisions from the comfort of your own computer, and you can leave the sweating for executing exactly what you want.

Landscape software is easy to use, and fun to play around with. But it offers so many practical features that it is definitely more than play. One of the most valuable features is the ability to see what a matured landscape will look like. When you plant seeds, seedlings, and young plants in your hard, it can be difficult to gauge what the entire yard will look like in a few years. Thanks to landscape software, this will no longer be a mystery or a surprise to you. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can analyze how your landscaping will look like through various stages of development. You can also use the landscape software to determine what new plants, or rocks and decorate items to add later in the process. Your landscaping project is always a work in process, and these software’s allow you to expertly tweak on your original design.

Also, when committing to a landscaping endeavor, make sure you know which plants will really thrive in your particular climate, and make sure you don’t use plants that will fail to thrive no matter what you do. It is extremely important to supplement your very cool landscape software with research and knowledge about your own yard. Combining these elements can make for a fantastic looking yard.

Hunter Crowell asked:

Most homeowners dream of having a beautiful lawn for their home, but they don’t dream of having to work on it whenever they have a spare moment. With this knowledge, you can understand why having a yard business is the perfect opportunity to make money for yourself.

With a yard business, you don’t have to wheel a lawnmower around the neighborhood, but you can offer to maintain other people’s lawns as well as do any other outside chores that they might need done: landscaping, planting, weeding and others. And you make money by being out in the sun and out doing something physical—it’s a win-win for everyone.

What you need

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to have a lot of lawn equipment in order to start your own yard business and make money doing it. You really just need a basic lawnmower as well as yard tools. And most of the time, you will already have these items and be ready to get started. In time, you can upgrade your equipment as it will wear out eventually if you have a lot of lawns to cut.

You will also want to keep a client listing of whose lawn you did and what you did to it. This will allow you to make money by offering to provide regular trims of the grass as well as weeding. And you’ll know when they need help because you’ve kept track of their business. You can also make suggestions in this listing and bring up possible jobs that they might like you to do in terms of landscaping and other yard work.

You may also want to buy or create a book of possible landscaping layouts that you will be able to recreate in someone’s yard. It’s much easier for a client to choose from pictures than to come up with a complicated design plan. You might want to subscribe to landscaping magazines and offer them to customers who want to try something different with their lawn and thus make money for you.

Growing over time

As your skills grow and your repertoire of landscaping ability widens, you’ll be able to make money in less time. You will be able to trim lawns in a shorter amount of time and thus be able to trim more lawns per day. At that point, you may want to hire more help to have multiple lawns being cut at the same time.

Along the same vein is an upgrade in equipment that can cut faster and more precisely than your own lawnmower. Try to keep up with the latest technology in lawn care so that you have access to the next best thing to make money more easily. A simple upgrade of a weedwacker can make all the difference in the appearance of a lawn.

You can also begin to offer classes in how to create the perfect lawn. This allows homeowners to learn some basic skills while also providing you with advertising for your own services. You can show people what they can do to make their lawn more attractive and then give free estimates on the work that you can do for them.

You will want to create strong relationships with the local yard supply shops so that you will be able to refer to each other as homeowners decide to make improvements on their own. When the homeowner buys supplies to create a particular effect, the supply scan recommend your services, and vice versa. That way, you both make money and both have plenty of clients.

A yard business goes far beyond cutting the grass these days, but it can still make money for you and your family.

Jimmy Cox asked:

The word lawn comes from the Celtic word Launde or Lande, denoting an uncultivated or untilled and infertile area covered with ferns, broom or heath, certainly not the modern idea of what a lawn is or should be. Because this name conveyed the idea of an expanse of open space, the word gradually came to mean an open grassy glade in the forest.

It was in this sense that Tennyson spoke when he wrote, “Those long, rank dark wood walks, drenched in dew, leading from lawn to lawn.” From this evolved the idea of more or less natural, grassy open spaces, not in woodland but surrounding a house and separating it from the fields and woods. And, of course, the present-day concept of a lawn is of an unbroken expanse of manicured emerald sward, perfect as a golf green.

As a matter of fact, much of our difficulty with lawns and their upkeep comes from this ideal cherished by the average homeowner – the incredible perfection of a golf green in peak condition. For most of us, it is an impossible ideal. Nevertheless, we often see a man whose grounds are shaded by magnificent trees, struggling to produce a perfect expanse of sun-loving grasses that will match the popular concept of what should surround a suburban home.

Adverse Lawn Conditions

In the lawn we crowd as many as forty to sixty individual plants into a square foot of turf. As they struggle to survive under these conditions of intense competition, we further complicate things by cutting away the healthiest, most vigorous part of the leaf – the young tip. We do this not to make things hard for the plant but because we are trying to force a low, compact, artificially dwarfed habit of growth, entirely different from the natural upright habit of these species. (They grow 30 to 40 inches tall in the wild or in a meadow.)

These factors add up to an environment in which the individual plant is suppressed to produce a uniform whole. The grass plants can only survive if aided by you, the lawnowner. It is important that you appreciate the artificial nature of the conditions under which you must operate, so that you will know not only what to do and when, but why. A misguided homeowner is a lawn’s worst enemy.

Easy Information

At the same time, it is important to recognize that not all lawns need to be smooth expanses of green velvet turf from thaw-out in spring to freeze-up in fall. Common Kentucky Bluegrass still has a place where the extra care and expense needed to maintain high quality sod seems too much. There are degrees of lawn excellence, and the choice of the right grasses is dictated by various considerations of sun, soil and so forth.

Summary

Don’t fight nature: Grow the grasses best suited to your lawn’s situation. If grass won’t grow (because of excessive shade, etc.), then plant one of the many handsome ground covers.

Live modern: Make maximum use of the improved knowledge, grass species, lawn tools and materials available today.

Trudy Coulter asked:

How complicated can it be to water the lawn? It’s basic, right? You put out the sprinkler or turn on the soaker hoses or even stand in the yard and hold the hose and spray the water around yourself, making sure to soak the buses and trees. You do it when you have time, or after work or dinner. What more can you do,right? Wrong. Sorry to make a science out of something so simple, but knowing when and when not to water your lawn is actually a science.

There are five factors to consider when watering your lawn: how much water, the time of day, the weather, the method of watering and the use of chemical agents or fertilizers in the water are all important factors.

Most turf lawns only need about three-quarters to one inch of water a week to keep that emerald green glow we all know and love. During hotter days or drought periods however, you actually want to cut back, not increase your watering. This allows the lawn’s growth to naturally slow during extreme conditions. It’s better for the water supply and actually healthier for the lawn.

Allowing lawns to go under mild droughts makes the root system stronger and healthier. Frequent watering actually harms root systems, making them shallower and more susceptible to pests. Frequent watering also adds to your community’s storm water runoff, which pollutes water systems and carries lawn chemicals into our rivers.

Of course the more you water your lawn the faster it grows and the more frequently you need to mow it.

Decide before the summer season begins if you’re going to let your lawn go dormant in the worst heat or if you’re going to water through a drought. If your town imposes watering restrictions you may want to decide early on not to try to have a green lawn summer round.

On the other hand, if you have unlimited water resources such as a deep well or nearby river you draw from, you may want to continue to keep your lawn green in spite of a drought. But don’t let the lawn turn brown then decide over the weekend to water it and green it back up. Sure it may look okay, but continually breaking a lawn’s dormant periods will actually deplete its food reserves and weaken the lawn.

Over watering not only impacts your water bill, but it can increase problems with diseases and insects too. Use a rainguage to determine how much water you’ve applied. Once you know how long it takes to water your lawn then you can adjust your sprinklers and watering time that way.

If you’re not sure then you should water simply walk across your lawn. Turn around and look for what is called ‘foot printing’ where your footprints remain in the grass. This is caused by leaf blades not bouncing back up after they’ve been stepped on it’s an indicator the lawn needs watering.When you do water make sure the water soaks down to the roots. You can’t do this in a few minutes so spraying the lawn with a hose for a few minutes out of guilt will do more harm than good. Not only does this promote shallow root systems it also encourages more weeds.

When you do water, water as early in the day as possible, usually when the grass and plants are already wet with dew. Watering later in the day when the sun is higher and temps are up can lead to evaporation of the water. Mid-day watering also leaves water droplets on the plants, which become small magnifying glasses that allow the sun’s ray to burn or scorch the plants. That leads to a brown, scruffy looking lawn in spite of adequate watering. You can water later in the afternoon or early evening, but late night watering can lead to problems with disease since the water sits on the lawn longer.

There are exceptions to this rule however. If daytime temps are extremely hot and nighttime temps don’t drop below 68-70 degrees you can safely water at night.

Weather is a factor as well. Keep an eye on the weather report and try not to water your lawn when it is expected to rain. Keep a rain gauge on your lawn so you can monitor how much rain the lawn received and adjust your watering that week accordingly.

If you’re doing the watering make sure your sprinkler system spreads a uniform path across the lawn. Many people will set out a sprinkler and never move it. That’s great for the patches that get the water, but uneven watering can lead to an uneven greenness. Put out coffee cans or some sort of straight sided container to help you measure your sprinkler’s application rates.

Watch for runoff in areas where your lawn slopes. Steeper hills and slopes may require additional watering to accommodate runoff and allow for better soil ***********. Knowing the kind of soil you have (whether it’s peat, loam, sand, silt or clay) is important. *********** is based on the percolation rate of your soil type. Some lawns may require shorter periods of watering followed by another period of watering to allow the first application to sink in.

Finally, when it’s time to use fertilizer or other chemical treatments on your lawn, try not to do so when it is expected to rain. The rains will only wash the nutrients out of the root system and down the drain. Follow the directions on the package and make sure that you water as directed to make sure you don’t burn your lawn or your grasses root system.