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The lawn care season has begun. What does this mean for homeowners? In our latest guest blog post, Lawn Dawg provides a series of spring lawn care tips to help homeowners better understand what they should and should not do to their lawns at this time of year.


I haven’t done my spring clean up yet!

spring lawn care tipsThat’s fine. We understand that not everyone can get out with the rake before we get our treatments done so we have selected a method of application that takes that into account. Light raking (meaning that you do not bear down with heavy force upon the rake handle) is just fine and we expect people to do that. What we want to avoid is raking so hard that you disturb the soil beneath the lawn – think of what an iron rake does to soil as an example, digging in. The crabgrass control is what we are concerned with here. We used to describe it as being like a layer of kitchen plastic wrap but further research has shown that its more of a gaseous layer that can self-repair to a limited extent.

If you have a landscaper that uses a dethatching rake in front of their mowers to tease the grass upwards for spring cleaning, that will be ok with our application, too. They remove a decent amount of material but if set correctly the teeth ride above the soil surface.

I wanted to dethatch!

Dethatching means different things to different people. For the landscaper mentioned above, it is a rake that lifts up the existing mat for cleaning and removal of a limited amount of thatch. Then there is the dreaded thatcher that you can get at the rental store. This machine uses hammer knives that are attached to a rotating shaft. This machine will really tear things up pretty good. I’m not so sure using this kind of dethatcher is a good idea. What winds up happening is that you cause a great deal of trauma to the lawn with all of the ripping and tearing that is done by such a course-bladed machine. Remember that the lawn has to repair itself and that effort requires an expenditure of energy, energy that we both put a lot of time and effort into banking last fall in the root zone. As spring gives way to summer, the weather continually gets less and less favorable for turfgrass growth. There is no guarantee that the weather will be favorable for replenishing all of that energy before summer slams into the lawn. We could have a dry spring, it could be overcast, any number of things. This is precisely why Lawn Dawg does not offer cultivation services during the spring, only in the fall. We realize that Mother Nature is always a factor in whatever you do in the landscape. You can either chose to have Mother Nature working with you or against you, but note well that she always wins the battle.

I wanted to aerate!

The rule of thumb is that aeration should be done during times of the year when both root development can be expected and favorable weather conditions for recovery can be anticipated. Early spring fits these conditions; indeed, if you golf you know that during the spring that dastardly superintendent ruins those beautiful greens with his aeration and topdressing!

The operative question is whether you need to aerate and is that need great enough to warrant tearing the lawn up and exposing weed seeds to the surface. Lawn Dawg deliberately does not aerate or seed during the spring because we have learned over the years that satisfaction with cultivation and seeding, especially seeding, cannot be relied upon.

We recommend waiting until the late summer and into the fall to perform these tasks on home lawns, and we have a fantastic optional service to offer to complete these important tasks.

I wanted to seed!

Seeding in the spring goes hand in hand with discussing aeration – can you seed in the spring with the anticipation of success when the weather turns hot and Mother Nature turns off the rain?

Normally, this equation revolves around discussing needs versus wants. This spring, I find that my own lawn has suffered from winter’s nonsense – there’s traffic damage along the walkway to the front door and I think that the snowplow driver was actually trying to dig up my lawn on purpose. I will have to do some seeding this spring, but I am already resigned to having to do it a second time in the early fall as I have no expectation of the spring seeding surviving.

Spring seeding also means that you cannot apply a preemergent crabgrass control to the same area you’re seeding. The active ingredient in the crabgrass control will do an equally good job killing off your newly sown turfgrass as it does crabgrass. Sometimes, customers will seed a section of a lawn or make repairs to plow damage like I mentioned above and as long as word makes it to the technician that services the lawn to be watchful of these areas we can in most cases accommodate both.

The bottom line for both spring aeration and spring seeding is this: work with Mother Nature, not against her as she always wins in the end.

I’ve already got crabgrass!

Much is made about the timing of crabgrass control during the spring, from following degree-day models to adhering to plant phenology (the study of how life cycles of plants and animals coincide in the environment – crabgrass seed germination occurring at the drop of flowers of the forsythia is the classic example of this in lawn care) – more about all of this later.

Each spring our call center will field calls from customers saying that they already have crabgrass in their lawn.

Of this I can speak without fear of contradiction, if someone is calling on April 1st to say they have crabgrass, it isn’t crabgrass they are looking at. How can I be so certain of that? It has to do with the life cycle of both the crabgrass plant and other plants they are looking at, the first of which is Tall Fescue. Both are weeds in the lawn (plants growing out of place) to be sure. But crabgrass is classified as an annual plant, meaning that it completes its life cycle, from germination to death, in a single season.

At this time of the season there is no developing crabgrass, it is still in its seed form. Contrast that to Tall Fescue, which is a perennial, meaning that it germinates in one season and lives and completes its life cycle over multiple seasons. Tall Fescue grows like mad during the spring and it thickly bladed and unsightly.

Another plant that will catch customers’ attention is a plant called Rough Bluegrass, or Poa trivialis. Instead of being a dark green and growing in an erect manner, Poa trivialis is an apple to lime green plant that grows in a clump.

Yet another plant that is confused with crabgrass is Annual Bluegrass, or Poa annua. This plant is very small in comparison to either Kentucky Bluegrass or Tall Fescue. It is apple green in color and has a distinctive wrinkled appearance to its leaves. It is also noted for its prolific seeding in the later part of the spring. A large patch of Annual Bluegrass will appear straw colored to almost white when in full flower. This seeding is why it is not a favorite plant on the golf course – the seedheads are difficult to putt on in that they cause the ball to bounce all over the place.

The dandelions are already up!

They are up and they’ve been up, it’s just that they’re rather inconspicuous until such time as they go to flower. Dandelions are hearty perennials that reproduce both by the prolific white seeds that they produce and through the large taproot that secures them to the soil. That is why turfgrass managers don’t want you to try and pick dandelions out of a lawn; they would rather you left them so when they are sprayed they are controlled completely.

Even though Lawn Dawg does a great job of cleaning dandelions out of a lawn, you cannot control a weed that is not there. In other words, if a dandelion seed germinates after a control application is performed it will not be controlled at all. And if that particular lawn has been inundated with dandelions for years, there will be millions of seed that will necessarily need to germinate in order to deplete the seed bank (a term that describes the sum total of all weed seeds present in a lawn’s soil) in the soil – and that germination occurs from late spring through early fall. Diligence is the key – keep after them all season long until there are none left.

Interestingly, not every weed that appears to be a dandelion is a dandelion. Similar looking weeds include the False Dandelion or Common Catsear, and Yellow Hawkweed. Hawkweed is especially common in many parts of the Lawn Dawg service area in acid soils. Comparing the vegetative portions of the plants rather than the similar looking flowers shows that Hawkweed is stiff and covered with prickly hairs (and is very uncomfortable to walk on with bare feet) while the leaves of Dandelion are softer and more fleshy.