Key Takeaways

• If you have a sprinkler system, adjust your watering schedule based on the weather. Most lawns will not require water for at least a couple of days after a good rainfall.

• Watch your sprinklers run occasionally to make sure they are functioning properly.

• Use a little math to figure out how much fertilizer you want to put down in each application.

• Most cool-season grasses should be mowed about 3 inches or higher for optimal lawn performance. For warm-season grasses, the range is usually around 1.5-2.5 inches.

• Your lawn is not the same as a golf course. You don't need the same aeration and pesticide applications that golf course superintendents use.

• Land-grant universities have turfgrass extension experts who will gladly answer many of your lawn care questions at no cost.
   

When you irrigate is also important. Watering in the evening will keep the grass wet all night and increase the chance of disease. Setting your irrigation to run in the early morning hours and finish around sunrise is ideal. It’s also worth running your system when you can watch it once in a while. Sprinklers leak and stop turning, there can be pressure issues, and countless other normal problems. If you never watch your system operate, those issues will persist and potentially get worse. You will be wasting water and the condition of your lawn will suffer.

How often you run the sprinklers is very important. The general consensus among our agronomists is that most homeowners water their lawns too much. Unless you’re establishing a new lawn or it’s exceptionally hot and dry, watering every day probably isn’t necessary. Frequent irrigation promotes shallow roots and disease. If you keep watering when the soil is saturated you can literally water a lawn to death – our agronomists have seen it happen. They recommend that you apply enough water to sufficiently wet the first few inches of the soil, then wait a few days and “refill the tank.” A quick cut into the lawn with a knife or shovel will let you feel the soil and know whether it’s moist or dry.

Be wise when you fertilize

Most homeowners fertilize their lawns, but they often don’t know what type of fertilizer to apply, how much to put down or the basics of making a successful application. A few facts and a little math will get you pointed in the right direction.

The three numbers on a fertilizer bag are the percent by weight of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium (in that order). Nitrogen is the nutrient needed most by grass, so that first number should be the basis for all your applications. Our senior consulting agronomist in the West Region, Cory Isom, recommends keeping it simple when it comes to picking a fertilizer. “Buy the cheap stuff,” said Isom. “Ammonium sulfate or urea works just fine; nitrogen is all you need and the grass won’t know how much you paid for it.” Just check the label to see if you need to water-in the product you’re using.

For cool-season grasses like tall fescue and Kentucky bluegrass, a spring and fall application of standard lawn fertilizer is a good foundation that can be supplemented with other applications of slow-release fertilizers in summer as needed. For warm-season grasses like bermudagrass and zoysiagrass, spring and summer applications are a good foundation because that’s when the grass is growing fastest. You want to apply fertilizer when the grass is growing so that it can use what you’ve put down.

The total annual nitrogen required for a healthy lawn will vary a bit based on many factors, but something in the neighborhood of 2 to 4 pounds of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet annually for most lawn grasses usually does the trick. Each application should contain between 1/2 to 1 pound of actual nitrogen per 1,000 square feet; just be sure to check if your state has restrictions on how much nitrogen can be applied at one time. If you don’t know how many square feet your lawn is, you can use a measuring wheel, tape measure, or pace it off to get a rough estimate. Any attempt at measuring is better than guessing.

To figure out how much to apply, dividing the desired pounds of actual nitrogen by the percent nitrogen (as a decimal) on the bag will tell you how much fertilizer is needed per 1,000 square feet of lawn. Below is an example of how the calculation is done.

Now that you know how much of what fertilizer to use, you need to make sure it’s applied correctly. It’s worth investing in a sturdy, high-quality broadcast spreader (the ones that spin fertilizer out from the bottom). Each brand of spreader will have a setting adjustment with different numbers or letters corresponding to different rates, and most fertilizer bags provide a specific setting for popular brands of spreaders to deliver the exact amount of product desired.

Keep an eye on how far your spreader throws so you don’t overlap the passes and end up with dark green stripes where too much was applied. A trick to get more uniform coverage is to split your fertilizer rate in half and do the entire yard in two different directions. This reduces the impact of skips or excessive overlaps. Remember to blow or sweep any pellets that land on driveways, walkways and other hard surfaces back into the lawn to keep fertilizer from washing down the drain during a rainstorm.  

Mow high and mighty

USGA agronomist Chris Neff told us that he frequently gets questions about what height to mow your lawn. “One of the best things you can do for the overall appearance and health of your lawn is mow it at the correct height. Lower is not better,” said Neff. “Often, the thought is if you mow it lower, you won’t have to mow as often, but that’s only true if you mow it low enough to kill your lawn.” Joking aside, there are many benefits to increasing the height of cut including a better appearance, more resistance to weeds, longer roots, better drought tolerance, increased visual quality and faster recovery from stress.

For most cool-season grasses, a mowing height around 3 inches or above is ideal. For most warm-season grasses, 1.5 to 2.5 inches is the sweet spot – with some exceptions like St. Augustine grass, which prefers being mowed at 3-4 inches. A few other tips are to keep your mower blades sharp and avoid breaking the “rule of thirds,” meaning each time you mow you shouldn’t remove more than 1/3 of the lawn’s height. Don’t let it turn into a jungle between mowings. If the lawn does get extra tall, raise the height of cut one setting for the next mow so you don’t injure the grass and then lower it back to normal after that.

Collecting and removing clippings is commonly done for aesthetic reasons or to avoid tracking clippings into the house after walking through the grass. However, recycling the clippings back into the lawn has many benefits including reducing the amount of fertilizer needed and improving soil quality. Plus, it saves you the trouble of disposing of the clippings.

Your lawn is not a golf course

Many of the other recommendations our agronomists shared fall into the category of what is practical and necessary for a home lawn. Homeowners often view golf courses as the pinnacle of turf quality and want to incorporate golf course maintenance practices into their lawn care. But your lawn is not subject to the same demands as a golf course so your lawn care program shouldn’t be the same either.

“Many of the reasons why superintendents perform certain maintenance practices on the golf course don’t translate to home lawns,” said Darin Bevard, senior director of championship agronomy for the USGA. You’re not compacting the lawn with mowers, carts or hundreds of golfers daily, or accumulating tons of organic matter, so aeration is rarely needed on home lawns. Well-maintained lawns can also tolerate more disease or insect activity than low-cut golf course turf, so preventative insecticide or fungicide applications usually aren’t necessary unless there’s a recurring problem.

While the average homeowner may not have access to a USGA agronomist, an underutilized resource for lawn care questions is the turfgrass extension agent at the nearest land-grant university. These experts are usually more than happy to share their knowledge and dispense some free advice.

Our agronomists hope these tips help you enjoy a better lawn this year. Your yard may not end up looking like a golf course, but following these basic recommendations should put you way ahead of the game on your street.