Lawn Care Mistakes to Avoid! Part 2
May 18, 2017 | By webadmin
In part one of mistakes to avoid in your Texas lawn, we covered common, identifiable mistakes people make while maintaining their lawn. The goal is grow a beautiful, healthy, vigorous lawn, understanding the mistakes is as important as knowing what the right moves are. Here are a few more to watch for when maintaining your lawn.
Trying to grow turf in shady areas
St. Augustine is the most shade tolerant of the lawn grasses we typically grow in this area, but it still needs a good 4 to 6 hours of sun in order to grow thick and strong. As your trees mature, they will eventually shade out the lawn beneath it - causing thinning and decline. Attempting to keep grass under large trees is a losing battle you do not want to fight. Save the money you would spend on multiple rounds of sod and invest it in a low maintenance ground cover at the base of your trees.
Watering too little and too often
Not only does this wasteful practice hurt your wallet, but it's bad for the lawngrass to water multiple times a week for short durations. With water restrictions permanently in place in most of the surrounding areas, we're only allowed to water a couple of days per week. This is not a problem if you're watering deeply to encourage deep root growth. Set your system to run multiple short cycles on the same day so that there is no run off and each subsequent cycle has a chance to soak in all the way.
We cannot emphasize enough the importance of watering infrequent and deep to encourage healthy root systems. This greatly increases water water retention in your soil, leaving plants less thirsty through the hottest times of the year.
Never fertilizing
Our clay soils may have nutrients in them; but they are often bound up and unavailable to your lawn and other landscape plants. Plus, organic matter is consumed by microbes and absorbed by your plants over time. If you don’t replenish organic matter, your soil can become non-productive. Neglecting to fertilize your lawn can cause it to go into serious decline. Feeding your soil and the lawn is important if you want to keep your grass lush.
One of the benefits organic fertilization, is that it feeds the soil as well as the plants. Healthy soil aids roots to take up nutrients, improves soil texture and feeds the microbes in the soil that help us to grow healthier lawns and garden plants.
Over-fertilizing
On the other hand, when it comes to fertilization, more is not always better. Be sure to follow the instructions on your lawn fertilizer package and do not apply more than is necessary. Or more often than is recommended. Over-fertilizing with synthetic fertilizers doesn’t always help the lawn (in fact you can burn it), but it can generate toxic runoff into city sewage systems.
Caring for your Texas lawn in the way you cared for your lawn in another state.
If you've recently moved to the DFW area from another place, the types of grass, as well as the timing for treatments is significantly different. Visit with staff at independent garden centers for expertise on the types of lawns in your area. Or, hire a horticulturally focused lawn care maintenance company. A team like ours will check your landscape for disease and pest issues, feed the soil as well as your plants and pay attention to timing and weather when it comes to mowing and feeding.
