Lawn Care For Dummies
Overview
Only one thing is standing between you and a fabulous lawn: It's called Lawn Care For Dummies. If you want a spiffy and well-coifed lawn (and not the overgrown, unruly one that people comment on when they pass by your house), you'll find everything you need to know to help you make your lawn the most dazzling spectacle on the block.
Let authors Lance Walheim and the gardening experts at the National Gardening Association treat you and your yard to a megadose of lawn care information. In Lawn Care For Dummies, Walheim and the NGA give you the dirt on all the essentials, including how to
* Design a low-maintenance or a high-maintenance lawn
* Evaluate the pros and cons of planting a lawn from seed or starting one from sod
* Discover how often you need to water your lawn without under-watering it or waterlogging it
* Choose a mower that's right for your grass type
* Deal effectively with wicked weeds and pesky insects
* Create alternative lawns, such as ground cover plants, decks, and patios
Lawn Care For Dummies also features a beautiful color insert with photos illustrating the various types of lawns found in yards across the world.
Let authors Lance Walheim and the gardening experts at the National Gardening Association treat you and your yard to a megadose of lawn care information. In Lawn Care For Dummies, Walheim and the NGA give you the dirt on all the essentials, including how to
* Design a low-maintenance or a high-maintenance lawn
* Evaluate the pros and cons of planting a lawn from seed or starting one from sod
* Discover how often you need to water your lawn without under-watering it or waterlogging it
* Choose a mower that's right for your grass type
* Deal effectively with wicked weeds and pesky insects
* Create alternative lawns, such as ground cover plants, decks, and patios
Lawn Care For Dummies also features a beautiful color insert with photos illustrating the various types of lawns found in yards across the world.
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About The Author
About the Authors Lance Walheim, former staff garden writer for Sunset magazine, is the nationally recognized author of over 30 widely read garden books, including The Natural Rose Gardener and Hungry Minds' Roses For Dummies??. The National Gardening Association (NGA) is recognized for its bimonthly National Gardening magazine and prolific work in science education for children. NGA is also the coauthor of Gardening For Dummies??, Roses For Dummies??, Perennials For Dummies??, Annuals For Dummies??, and Container Gardening For Dummies??.
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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 pests with tips on how to identify and control them:
Armyworms and cutworms: Armyworms are most common in cool, moist spring weather.
Lawn Care
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.Portable sprinklers aren’t necessarily the most efficient system to use to water your grass. You know — hooking up the oscillating or impulse sprinklers, dragging the hose all over the lawn, watching the clock, and trying to remember when you should move the sprinkler to a different part of the lawn.
You can grow almost any tree successfully in a lawn, provided you properly take care of the tree and the lawn. You can prune densely growing tree branches to let more light through so that grass can grow underneath. You can also find ways to protect young trees from the meanest lawn mower.
To get you started, the following lists suggests some common trees that get along with lawns.
If you’re not sure what type of grass to plant, you need to determine what you value most in a lawn. The most commonly planted cool-season grasses include bent grass, Kentucky bluegrass, fescues, and ryegrass:
Bent grasses: Creeping bent grass (Agrostis stolonifera) is a fine-textured perennial that forms a tightly knit turf.
If you live in a warm climate, you should choose from among these commonly used warm-season grasses: Bahia grass, common and hybrid Bermuda grass, centipede grass, St. Augustine grass, and zoysia grass. Whether you live in Florida or California, chances are that your lawn has one or a combination of these grasses growing in it:
Bahia grass: Bahia grass (Paspalum notatum) is a tough, coarse grass that roots deeply and extensively.
Your climate zone is not the only factor that determines what kind of grass you should plant in your lawn. Your yard space might have its very own microclimate. Say you live in North America — the Midwest. Now even more specifically, say you live on the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan. (Go Tigers!) You may have a pretty good idea of what your overall climate is like — cold winters and warm, humid summers with frequent rain.
Lawn Care
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 to hook your system to the house water supply.
Tapping into the water supply is one part of the installation that you should really get help on from a professional installer or plumber.
If you have decided that you are ready for a total lawn makeover, your first order of business should be to get rid of the weeds. Most professional landscapers will tell you that the best way to get rid of weeds is to spray the entire area with an herbicide.
The most commonly available, easiest to use, and relatively safest herbicide is one with the active ingredient glyphosate.
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 two underground burrowers are pretty easy to tell apart.
Moles are small, 6- to 8-inch-long, furry mammals with distinctively pointed snouts and large, clawed front paws they use for digging.
Having a low-maintenance lawn isn't impossible. It's all in the design. Of course, a small lawn is easier to care for than a large one, but there are other things you can do to make a lawn easy to maintain. Some of the following design techniques will make your lawn easier to care for:
Put in mowing strips: These strips are usually several inches wide and encircle all or part of your lawn.
Face it. Dry climates, such as the desert Southwest, and the amount of water that a lawn needs make having a lawn out of the question for some people. Here are some more usable or low-maintenance alternatives:
Plant ground covers: Ground covers are usually low-growing, often spreading plants that form a uniform layer of foliage when planted close together.
Fertilizer recommendations are based on the amount of actual nitrogen a lawn needs in a year. The amount of grass fertilizer you decide to apply should take into account several factors, including the type of grass you have planted and the size of your lawn.
Different types of grasses need different amounts of nitrogen to keep them vigorous and healthy.
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:
How much you fertilize: The more nitrogen fertilizer you apply, the faster the lawn grows, and the more you have to mow.
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. Other aerators use short spikes to punch holes in the turf. Spiking is not nearly as effective as core aerating, but it’s better than nothing.
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 many nurseries loan them.
To use a broadcast spreader properly, you need to know how wide a band the spreader covers.
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 lawn and are particularly useful for large lawns.
To use a broadcast spreader properly, you need to know how wide a band the spreader covers.
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 manufacturer presets a new spreader to apply lawn fertilizers at specific rates according to the amount of nitrogen needed per 1,000 square feet.
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 resource, you need to use it wisely.
Here’s a wrap-up of how you can water your lawn with conservation in mind.
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:
Portable sprinklers: Portable sprinklers come in myriad styles with varying application rates (how fast they apply water) and application patterns (covering square, round, or rectangular areas).
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 with gas or electric motors. Gas-driven models are most common, but the environmental benefits of electric mowers increase their popularity.
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. Don’t forget — lawns are where kids play and where birds feed. Lawns should be safe places to be.
Following are some choices for controlling lawn insects:
Alter cultural practices.
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 comb out the debris. You can buy what’s called a thatching rake, which has knifelike blades rather than normal tines.
No one likes a weedy lawn. Following are 16 of the most troublesome lawn weeds, with information to help you identify and control them, so you can have the nicest most weed-free lawn on the block:
Annual bluegrass: Annual bluegrass is a bright green annual grass with grain-like seedheads that give the lawn a whitish, speckled look.
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 simple physical maladies like fertilizer burn. If you can’t identify the disease, you’ll have a hard time fixing it.
Edgings help give your lawn a very finished and manicured look. They help prevent grass from migrating onto any sidewalks, gravel, or mulched areas along the edges of your lawn. They also help keep ground covers like ivy from migrating onto your lawn. Finally, they help provide clean, clear edges for your mower or trimmer to keep the grass cut neat and trim.
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 to have these tools on hand:
Trenching shovel or a trenching machine
Hacksaw for cutting the PVC pipe
Pipe wrench
Pick
Tape measure
String
Mallet
Stakes
Utility knife
Screwdriver
Pipe tape for screw-together pipe fittings
PVC glue (to connect pipe)
Pipe cutter for copper (if necessary)
Electrical tape (if you need to make any electrical connections)
Roll up your sleeves and get out that elbow grease.
Leveling and grading the ground around your home in preparation for planting grass seed for a new lawn can be a fairly simple but strenuous task. Good grass is only one and probably the least important reason you have to level the ground around your house. Preserving the foundation of your house is the other, more important reason.
Laying sod is a gratifying experience—you get a new, green lawn in no time! The time to lay sod is early morning before it gets too hot. The soil in the planting area should be moist, not soggy or dry. Water thoroughly one or two days before the sod is delivered so that the top several inches of soil are wetted.
Before you put in a new lawn you need to level and grade the space. If your ground is relatively level, gently sloped, and has no major impediments like huge boulders, you probably can grade your lawn yourself.
The tools you need for soil grading are simple. First, because you may need to haul soil from a higher spot to a lower spot, make sure that you have a wheelbarrow and shovel.
If you live in a hot-summer, mild-winter area where warm-season grasses predominate, you can overseed the lawn with cool-season grasses, which keep the lawn green all winter. Because annual ryegrass fills in so quickly, it’s usually used for overseeding, but you can also use perennial ryegrass or one of the fescues.
One way to get your new lawn started is to plant plugs—a small, 2- to 3-inch-wide, -square or -round piece of sod. One thing’s for sure, planting plugs does save money. A square yard of sod provides 2,000 to 3,000 Bermuda grass or zoysia grass sprigs; 500 to 1,000 St. Augustine or centipede grass sprigs; 324 two-inch plugs; or approximately one bushel of sprigs.
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, moisture, aeration, and so on — and a way to spread. A fungus’s reproducing spores travel from one place to another, usually through moisture or wind.
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 basically, the procedure is as follows:
Turn the mower off and disconnect the spark plug.
How often your blades need to be sharpened depends on how large your lawn is, the type of grass you have, and a bunch of other things.
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 for the blades to get at it, or you can’t get the wheels into planting beds nearby. You need to do some edging or trimming along the perimeter of the lawn.
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 (a systemic herbicide effective against broadleafed weeds). The dicamba can kill the trees and shrubs just as effectively as the weeds.
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, type of grass, and so on. Follow these tips when watering, and your lawn will shine:
Water to the proper depth: Moisture should penetrate to about 6 to 8 inches deep.
Small dead spots are a fact of life for most lawn owners. A number of things can cause the spots, including spilled gas or fertilizer, insect damage, or dog urine. Whatever the cause, patching a dead spot is relatively easy.
In fact, there are several lawn patch kits available at most nurseries and garden centers.
The United States contains nine lawn regions. The region you live in determines the type of lawn you should plant. The list here can give you guidance about the grasses to plant in your zone, but you can get more specific information from local nursery growers or your cooperative extension agency.
Zone 1 — Coastal West: Rain is generally plentiful in the Coastal West, although in the southern parts of the area it rains mostly in winter.
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 high or low spot in your lawn that raises havoc with your mower, here’s how to fix it:
With a spade outline the uneven area by pushing the spade in a few inches around the perimeter.
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 (most irrigation system instructions include graph paper for a map). Note all measurements, trees, shrubs, sidewalks, driveways, the house, tool sheds, gazebos, and any other obstacles that you need to consider.
Starting a lawn from seed is the least expensive way to transform your home or garden with a new lawn. Find information and step-by-step instructions on how to turn grass seed into a lush, beautiful lawn.
The best time to start lawns from seed, or by any means, is just prior to the grass's season of most vigorous growth.
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. After all, if you wanted weeds, you wouldn’t have planted a lawn in the first place.
You can choose from several techniques for keeping lawn weeds to a minimum.
The basic components of your lawn irrigation system are control valves, pipes, pipe fittings, risers, sprinkler heads, and controllers. You need to know these components and what each does, whether you’re installing the system yourself or hiring a professional:
Control valves: Control valves regulate the flow of water from the main source through the pipes and on to the sprinkler heads.
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 an even supply. Fertilize grasses when it’s naturally dormant, and you’re wasting fertilizer. Space your applications too far apart, and your grass grows fine for a while, then slows down, and then speeds up again with the next application.
Generally, cool-season grasses are best suited for moist, northern climates, where summers, although warm, are relatively short, and winters are cold. Such grasses also do well in high elevations with adequate rainfall and coastal areas where temperatures are moderate — temperatures don’t stay above 90 degrees for long periods.
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