Taking care of your lawn so that it stays healthy is a year-round job… excluding winter when it is dormant. The earliest time to start maintaining your lawn is in early spring. This time frame in early spring is primarily a prep time. You want to get all you tool’s ready for spring and summer. The main tool we all use is the lawn mower. You should sharpen the blades to ensure that they will cut the grass smoothly. You should also clean it so that any type of seeds and larva will not find a nesting place in your lawn after the first mow.

Once the snow is gone you should go out and remove any left-over leaves, sticks, or clippings that were left from the following fall. After cleaning your tools and lawn the pre-spring prepping can begin. The first step in preparing your lawn is reseeding. A sure way to make sure your grass seeds take is by puncturing the ground creating holes for the seeds to lay in. this allows the seed to root faster and prevent birds feasting on them. To do this you can use a trust old pitch fork and pierce areas that have dead grass. There are also specialized shoes that have spikes on the end to allow you to simply walk and make uniform holes through out your lawn… no, golf shoes don’t work. After seeding you can fertilize the ground to give nutrients to grass so that it grows and sets its roots deep. If you don’t want to make holes laying hay over the seeds also does the trick.

Early spring is also a good time to spray herbicides and pesticides to preemptively stop weeds and grubs from infesting your lawn. Once spring is in full bloom you can continue to mow, fertilize, and spray to keep the lawn growing to summer. In summer you want to cut back on fertilizing because this will dry out your lawn and require more watering than needed. In this season you want to water and mow your lawn twice week. Over doing it will kill the grass, while neglecting the lawn will allow weeds and pest to flourish. When watering it helps to do it deep unscheduled, especially after a couple of hot days. This will allow the roots to strengthen and grow to find a water supply. Also use herbicides and pesticides to keep the invaders at bay, particularly if you did so in spring.

Once we start to roll in to fall the main duty in this season is preparing the lawn for next spring. If there are dead patches of grass now is the time to remove them and reseed, remember to lay hay over the patches to prevent critters from eating them. You can fertilize the grass to give it food for when they go dormant for the winter and come out stronger I the spring. When watering in the fall you don’t want to go overboard, just water the grass till it is moist kind of like morning dew. Lastly do everything you can to clean leaves and fall debris off your lawn. Leaving it there when it snows will kill the grass and give you dead spots come spring. Although lawn care is a year-round job it is simple and easy to keep your lawn healthy for decades to come.