Spring Lawn Care Tips for Your Home
Looking to add some overdue curb appeal to your lawn? Are you a home owner with a yard where your kids and pets play? Home lawn care can be a challenge for those who never grew up with a natural green thumb. That’s why we’re here to help with some tips from the experts at Western Canada’s biggest turf farm. We provide lush, green sod to lay down on your lawn any month of the year – here’s how to take care of it in the critical spring season.
Aerate Your Lawn
Your green lawn is a living organism and needs to breathe. All winter long, dead leaves, shoots, moss and other naturally-decaying vegetation combine into thatch, choking your grass just as it’s trying to take in that fresh spring air.
Fortunately, aerating your lawn in the spring isn’t that difficult and can be handled with the most basic of tools. As described in our winterizing lawn care guide, you can manually aerate by using aeration poles that look a lot like pogo sticks to poke holes in your lawn a few inches deep. Or, you can rent motorized aeration equipment – but be forewarned that while it speeds up the process, it can take some heavy lifting. Doing your aeration the old fashioned way can actually mean less of a workout (and less recovery time needed after).
Those aeration holes need to be spaced every six inches or so, letting air, water and nutrients get down to where they’re needed. That’s the first step!
Overseeding for Problem Patches
Normal foot traffic, animal behavior or even minor differences in sunlight availability and elevation can do damage to your lawn in ways that may not be apparent until the spring. Now you can tell where the trouble-spots are – bare patches that distract from the overall look of an otherwise-well-tended grass lawn.
Overseeding is easy. First, you can spread that grass seed by hand if the patch is small enough. For a bigger patch, use a lawn spreader or mechanical seeder to make sure you spread it out evenly. Next, give that unsightly patch a dose of slow-release nitrogen fertilizer. Wait about 5 weeks or so and then add quick-release nitrogen fertilizer on that same patch. With these simple steps, you can achieve great results that leave your lawn seamlessly lush and healthy-looking.
Fertilizer Helps Your Lawn Grow Up Healthy
After the dormancy of winter, your lawn needs nutrients to help it achieve peak performance for that spring growth spurt.
Bags of fertilizer come in all different sizes and have different numbers on them to indicate the growing properties of the contents.
How much fertilizer do you need? Which one do you get for your lawn? See our handy guide to What You Need to Know about Fertilizing Your Home Lawn. According to our own experts, Spring. 18-18-18 fertilizer is a balanced product. It’s got plenty of nitrogen to boosts root growth just when it’s needed, with potassium to build up the cell wall. You need that phosphorus for root growth in the spring.
Western Turf Farms provides fertilizer and other lawn growing products in addition to sod, to handle all your growing needs.
Dealing with the European Chafer Beetle
The sod we grow at Western Turf Farms is cultivated to be robust against ordinary pests you might see in BC and Alberta – but in the past few years, a new threat has emerged that is damaging even the most hardy of grass species. Particularly in BC’s Lower Mainland, the European Chafer Beetle has turned many lawns into feeding grounds for birds, raccoons and other animals. Urban wildlife has no compunction about digging up your lawn to get at the beetle grubs, turning healthy lawns into an unsightly mess.
Fortunately, there’s an all-natural remedy that does not require harmful synthetic pesticides. Learn how to use all-natural, microscopic nematodes to deal with your beetle problem in our handy guide, How To Keep Your Lawn Safe from the Chafer Beetle. Water your grass and then add the nematodes to the entire area to prevent these beetles from spreading and removing the incentive for animals to damage your lawn. The City Farmer News video provides an easy-to-follow demonstration of how to solve this issue. Consider sharing the information with your neighbours to help ensure the problem does not return to your area.
Choose Organic Sod for Your New Lawn
Even with the best intentions, a home lawn can sometimes become unsalvageable due to neglect, beetle damage, drought and other natural causes. If you need to start fresh, consider purchasing new sod from us. We’ll deliver right to your door, so your landscapers can roll out the sod for you to have a lush, brand new lawn taking root in just days.
Organic sod is best for the safety of your children and pets. And, a healthy, natural lawn helps to maintain a natural, healthy planet.
See our guide, 5 Reasons to Buy Organic Sod.
Share Our Tips for Spring Lawn Care
We hope these tips for spring lawn care have been useful. If so, feel free to let us know and share it with your friends and neighbors. We’re also happy to help if you have further questions, contact us at 1.888.888.7072 for free advice! Check our homepage for current special offers. Happy Spring!
