As temperatures drop in late summer, you must step up your lawn maintenance to ensure you still have a healthy lawn in the fall. There are several things you can do now to get your lawn ready for fall. Read on to learn some tips as well as how an arborist can help you.
Test Your Soil
Testing your soil before fall takes the guesswork out of how you should be managing the pH and nutrition of your soil. By making the necessary improvements before fall, you will have extra time to prepare before it’s super cold. To find out more about the perfect pH for your lawn, you can contact an arborist. If the arborist decides to visit and check out your grounds, you can also take the time to ask them a bit about your trees.
If you find out the pH is not in its normal range, you can use fast-acting lime. This will restore balance to your soil and encourage a healthier, greener lawn through fall. You should also consider fertilizing your soil. Ideally, you should do this about six weeks before your first expected frost. A high-nitrogen fertilizer will help to ensure that your lawn has vigorous roots and increased energy reserves to survive the increasingly low temperatures.
Remove Excess Thatch
There’s a thick layer of organic matter that collects between the soil and your lawn that usually benefits your lawn when it’s thinner. However, when this layer starts getting too thick, it can hinder the movement of water and nutrients. Apart from that, it also encourages disease. To dethatch, you can use a handheld rake or a dethatcher. These tools will cut into the layer of thatch and pick it up for removal. This will help to restore a proper interface between your lawn and the soil.
Fill in Bald Spots
The average homeowner spends five to 8.5 days yearly caring for and maintaining their lawn. Depending on location, people usually set aside four hours per week to care for their lawn. Those who live in cooler climates spend about 150 hours a year, while those in warmer climates about 208 hours a year.
You can dedicate some of that lawn maintenance time to fixing any bare spots on your lawn as you prepare for fall. For the best results, you can get an all-in-one lawn repair mixture that you can find in most garden shops. To do this, you will need to loosen up the soil on the patch with a rack and then pour the lawn repair mixture over the lawn bald spot. If this doesn’t work, you can consult an arborist to see if there is anything wrong with your lawn.
Lawn maintenance and preparation for fall are not that difficult. The most important thing is to ensure you don’t fall behind on your maintenance tasks. Also, never forget to water your lawn every other day towards fall.