With the orchards in bloom, warmer temperatures, and scattered rain showers it finally feels like spring here in western Colorado. Summer will be here before we know it. For a beautiful yard complete with a lush green lawn you can’t resist walking barefoot in, there are a few things your lawn needs right away. Proper lawn maintenance in spring can greatly improve the chances of your maintaining its health and beauty throughout the summer. Maple Leaf Landscaping & Maintenance offers these services, and expert advice about lawn care that is very specific to our regional weather patterns, soil conditions, and water availability. Please review the following tips, and call to reserve your space in our 2018 schedule (970)234-9691. We welcome your questions and look forward to sharing our expertise.
1. Aeration – and soon!
The best time of year to aerate your lawn is spring, as the grass plants are awakening from winter dormancy and hungry for nutrients. The list of ways it improves the overall health and appearance of your lawn is long. Maple Leaf Landscaping & Maintenance carefully selected the best machines to maximize benefits to your lawn and achieve them in a time efficient manner. Aeration is the process of removing small cores of thatch and soil from your lawn. Using a professional grade machine ensures that soil compaction is lessened, not worsened, and that holes are evenly spaced and consistently sized — this allows maximum delivery and absorption of oxygen and nutrients from mulch, fertilizer, and water by your lawn’s root system. To learn more about aeration, you can visit our local CSU Extension’s publications on aeration and lawn care, or give us a call with your questions.
2. Careful Fertilizer Application
A careful balance of well-timed nutrient delivery is essential to having that beautiful, consistently green and thick lawn everyone loves to have. While nitrogen is often the most talked about or well known, it must be applied with careful measurement and timing to be effective. A mixture of nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, potassium and other nutrients is necessary for a healthy lawn. The color, texture, and thickness of the grass blades themselves, are good indicators of what the lawn needs. When deciding when and how much fertilizer to apply, it’s also important to know what fertilizers were used the previous year, and to look at the forecast for coming rain or especially high temperatures. Over application of fertilizer can be as downright destructive as a complete lack of it. For all of these reasons and more, it’s a good idea to consult with a lawn care professional that is familiar with our specific climate when getting ready to fertilize.
3. Routine Mowing & Mulching
Routinely mowing your lawn to a specific height, with a mulching blade will greatly improve your lawn’s health. The healthiest lawns require the least frequent routine maintenance, so the beauty and ease of care is a “win-win.” Maple Leaf’s fleet of front deck professional grade mowers always arrive on the job with freshly sharpened blades that are designed for mulching. They ensure a clean cut that doesn’t damage the grass plant, while reducing the clippings into extra small pieces for a mulch that quickly breaks down into extra nutrition for your lawn’s roots. Regular residential mowers with blades that are not properly sharpened damage the grass blades by ripping them. They also leave behind full-length grass clippings that blow around in the wind and take longer to breakdown, which makes distribution of the nutrients from them very inconsistent. For the best results, hire a professional to take care of the mowing, and just enjoy the results.
4. Mindful Watering
Everyone knows that lawns need plenty of water, and as with other aspects of lawn care and maintenance, it helps to consider tips from local pros on the “when” and “how much” for maximum lawn health and natural resource conservation. A sprinkler system, especially one with a timer, is the easiest and most efficient way to water your lawn, and Maple Leaf Landscaping can install a new system for you, or start up, repair, and fine tune your existing system.
Whether you’re watering your lawn with a hose and sprinkler or programming your automated irrigation system, follow these guidelines for timing and water usage. Always water in the evening. Watering during a hot sunny day sacrifices precious water to evaporation, before it can even soak down to your lawn’s root system. The amount to apply depends on many different factors, such as the amount of thatch build-up your lawn has. It’s very important to keep thatch to a minimum so water can easily get to the roots. Thatch reduction measures include power-raking, aeration, and mulching.
According to Colorado State University, you should “let grass species and health, soil conditions, and weather conditions dictate irrigation practices, not the number of days between waterings.” When it’s especially hot and/or windy, healthy lawns may need up to 2.25” of water each week and may need less when summer days are cloudy and cooler. The deeper and stronger the lawn’s root system, the less frequently you will need to water. Water long just long enough for moisture to saturate the lawn’s root zone, anything more than that is simply a waste of water. You can test with a probe to determine the timing for proper saturation.
Better yet…
Just leave the (hard) yard work to the pros, so you can relax and enjoy the results all summer long. Call Maple Leaf Landscaping & Maintenance in Grand Junction, Colorado today at (970) 234-9691.