Connecting a Lawn Irrigation System to a Home Water Supply
Connecting your lawn irrigation system to the plumbing system in your house is one of the final steps of installation. The water for your lawn irrigation system has to come from somewhere, so you need [more…]
Choosing Between Portable Sprinklers or In-Ground Irrigation Systems
Choosing an irrigation system is about convenience, efficiency, and water conservation. Deciding on portable sprinklers or an in-ground irrigation system basically comes down to cost versus time and convenience [more…]
Planning Your Lawn Irrigation System
Even if you can’t draw a straight line, you have to make a map of your property to plan your irrigation system. Draw your map to scale (such as 1 inch equals 10 feet) on graph paper as accurately as possible [more…]
How to Install a Lawn Irrigation System
After you plan your underground lawn irrigation system and purchase all your materials and equipment, you’re ready to start installation. If necessary you can rent a trenching machine for the job. Plan [more…]
How Often Should You Mow Your Lawn?
Here’s a shocker — how often you need to mow your lawn depends on how quickly it grows and each type of grass has an ideal height. Of course, how quickly your lawn grows depends on a number of conditions [more…]
How to Sharpen Your Rotary Mower Blades
Although you need to take reel mowers to a lawn mower shop for a professional sharpening, you can sharpen rotary mower blades yourself. Of course, you need to check the owner’s manual for specifics, but [more…]
How to Trim Your Lawn
Trimming your lawn means cutting the grass that your lawn mower couldn't access. Most lawn mowers do a poor job of cutting grass along the edges of the lawn. The grass just grows too sideways in that area [more…]
How to Dethatch Your Lawn
Dethatching your lawn improves its overall health. When you dethatch, you actually cut through the thatch with knife-like blades and then removing the debris. It is a combinglike operation in which you [more…]
How to Aerate Your Lawn
Aerating is the process of punching small holes all over your lawn. The most effective type of aerating is with a gas-powered machine called a core aerator that pulls out small cores of grass and soil. [more…]
How to Water Your Lawn
Knowing how to water a lawn the right way is critical to the overall health of your lawn. The frequency and amount of water you apply to grass vary, depending on soil, time of year, weather conditions, [more…]
How to Choose an Efficient Lawn Sprinkler
Choosing the right lawn sprinkler is one of the most important decisions you can make if you want a healthy lawn without wasting water. Sprinklers are either portable or fixed: [more…]
How to Care for Your Lawn during Drought
When the skies dry up and every drop of water becomes precious, your lawn may be the first place you want to cut back on watering. You have many ways to reduce watering. Water is such a precious and limited [more…]
When to Fertilize Your Lawn
When and how often you should apply fertilizer to your lawn depends on the type of grass you grow. Grasses need nitrogen and other nutrients during their seasons of active growth, and they grow best with [more…]
How to Apply Lawn Fertilizer
You can apply dry lawn fertilizers to your grass with one of two types of spreaders — drop or broadcast. If you don’t need this equipment often, don’t buy them; both are available at rental yards, and [more…]
How to Calibrate a Drop Spreader
Calibrate your drop spreader every year or two to ensure accurate usage (and a great-looking lawn). Using a drop spreader, you apply fertilizer to a narrow band of grass directly below the spreader. The [more…]
How to Calibrate a Broadcast Spreader
A broadcast spreader is more difficult to calibrate than a drop spreader is because you can’t catch the fertilizer as it’s being thrown out. Broadcast spreaders throw fertilizer over a wide area of your [more…]
How to Choose the Right Mower for Your Lawn
Having the right lawn mower can make the job so much easier. Basically, you can choose from two types of lawnmowers, rotary and reel, with a number of variations of each. Either is type of mower is available [more…]
Leveling and Fixing Uneven Spots in Your Lawn
In cold-winter climates, freezing and thawing causes soil to heave and become bumpy and uneven. Even earthworms can cause your lawn to become uneven, by leaving castings on soil surface. If you have a [more…]
Strategies for Dealing with Lawn Weeds
A completely weed-free lawn is impractical, if not impossible. A beautiful lawn that includes a few weeds is both practical and possible — and acceptable. Most people prefer to keep weeds to a minimum. [more…]
How to Use Lawn Herbicides
You must use lawn herbicides carefully. Most of these products kill desirable plants as well as weeds. For example, tree roots and shrubs growing near the lawn can absorb some herbicides, such as dicamba [more…]
How to Control Insects that Attack Your Lawn
After you figure out what type of insect pest is creating problems for your grass, you have many treatment choices, including ones that don’t rely on strong insecticides and have a low impact on the environment [more…]
Seven Lawn Pests and What to Do about Them
Even if you follow strict lawn maintenance procedures and plant the right type of grass for your climate, you can still run into trouble. Following are seven of the most troublesome and common lawn insect [more…]
How to Prevent Fungus from Damaging Your Lawn
There's a fungus among us—or rather, in your lawn. Fungi cause many — in fact, almost all — lawn diseases. To thrive, a fungal disease needs the right plant to infect, the right conditions — temperature [more…]
How to Identify Lawn Diseases
Here’s the cold, hard truth about lawn diseases — most are very difficult to identify properly. Lawn diseases are hard to tell apart and easy to confuse with other problems, such as insect damage and even [more…]
Dealing with Gophers and Moles in Your Lawn
Gophers and moles can be a real threat to a lawn. Digging, burrowing, trashing the whole lawn — don’t these critters have anything better to do? People often confuse moles and gophers, even though these [more…]
