Weekly Lawn Maintenance

Jay Nygaard: Jay Nygaard here with Great Outdoors Landscape to talk to you about weekly lawn maintenance and important part of that maintenance is a clean, well-kept lawn mower. A sharp blade will provide a nice, clean cut and will provide the blades of grass with resistance against disease and fungus.

You never want to cut your lawn more than one-third of the blade at a time and if you have a bluegrass rye fescue blend lawn, such as this one, you want to keep it at a two-and-a-half to three inch height and in doing so, will shade out any weed seeds that are at the base of the lawn and will also conserve water. The shorter you keep your grass, the more water it will consume to stay green and healthy.

If you've let your lawn go to a point where it needs to be cut and you're going to take more than that, you want to do it over several days to minimize stress on the plant.

Options for mowing your lawn include bagging or mulching. Now bagging your clippings and removing them and disposing of them takes more work and is less beneficial to your lawn, whereas mulching can provide a natural fertilizer and much need nitrogen to keep your lawn green and lush.

When mulching your lawn the clippings will go back into the yard and settle in and decompose over time. One of the things you have to look for is that those clippings don't build up to a point where they are more than a half inch thick. This is called thatch and when thatch becomes more than a half inch thick, it becomes a problem. It promotes fungus and disease.

To mitigate that, you can bag your mowing clippings for several weeks until the existing thatch is composted to a level back to under a half an inch. Other things you can do to eliminate thatch is aeration and aeration is a topic we'll cover in our next segment, seasonal maintenance.