Lawns require significant inputs to ensure you get the best from them. Once you establish one, you have an extra duty to care for it. And still, there’s more.
While you may weed and feed your lawn every way right, you must know the correct timings for everything.
So, the act of weeding and feeding a lawn isn’t something you do robotically. And, the same applies to other lawn-care tasks like aeration, refilling ditches, trapping moles, and mowing altogether.
5 Best Weed & Feed Products
Under some circumstances, you may find yourself so limited in the time you may require to undertake the maintenance tasks for your lawn.
What do you do?
You can reach out to friends or professionals to do everything at the right time.
There’s no doubt when you do the weeding and feeding at the right times, and you should end up with the best lawn within your neighborhood.
Best Times to Carry Out the Feeding and Weeding
1. Avoid Treatment of Broadleaf Weeds While Conditions are Extremely Dry
Some of the broad-leaf weeds you’ll find on your lawns include- but not limited to:
- Dandelions
- Clovers
- Creeping Charlie
Other broad-leafs weeds invade your gardens and have very fast-spreading mechanisms.
To keep their spread under control, you have two options:
- One is the spraying of a broad-leaf organic weed-killing herbicide.
- Second, the use of granular weed feed products.
Pro- Tip on timing:
Apply the granular feeds early on a morning with plenty of dew on the grass. In case you choose to use organic herbicides, look out for a day that is both warm and sunny.
Your best time for the application of either granular of sprays matters, and it best coincides with the optimal conditions for the chemicals eliminating the weeds to take effect.
For instance, granules work well with wet-dewy leaves. They require water for them to stick on the leaves of the weeds. So, when the grass is dry, and you proceed to apply them, you waste on the chemicals, and both time and money.
Regarding the warm sunny conditions for the spray-weed killers, the high temperatures provide optimum conditions for the absorption of the chemicals into the cells of the weeds.
The other tricky way around it is to water the lawn before applying the chemicals if you are on long-dry summers.
Here are some good broad leaf herbicides:
2. Avoid Application of Weed Preventers Very Late on Schedules
Weed preventing chemicals are technically the Pre-emergent herbicides. They are particularly useful in the control of the crabgrass plus other weeds by inhibiting their germination.
If you want great results, apply them early on the schedule to avoid running late – while the weed-seeds have already sprouted.
Best Times for Application:
You may want to look at natural calendars. And it’s best to apply the weed prevention chemical once the blooms from forsythia drop (mostly between March and May).
Pro Tip:
Weed prevention- chemicals are ineffective after the weeds have germinated. The critical factor here is to apply them before the weeds grow.
Crabgrass is one of the nuisances and naturally germinates after the bloom of forsythia. One proper weed-preventer is the corn gluten meal. Remember to follow your application with water to help the chemical take maximum effects.
Another Super- Pro Tip:
If you plan to plant on a cool season, do it during fall. It’s ideal timing for you to sow warm-season grasses into late spring. However, do not hasten to apply the weed preventers and seeds concurrently. You’ll end up killing the same grass-seeds you plan to germinate for your lawn-grass.
Here are a few popular weed preventers.
3. Failing to Apply Fertilizers to Your Lawn
Naturally, as the lawn grows, it takes up nutrients from the soil. Also, as you mow and rake away the grass, it takes nutrients away. A good lawn requires that you consider topping up the nutritional values into the soil by the addition of fertilizers.
Also, it’s best if you can carry out a soil test on an annual basis. The soil test results will best guide you on the requirements for replenishing the deficits by informing the components to the fertilizer you pick to apply on the lawn.
Here is a list of five top-rated fertilizers for your lawn:
4. Aerating Lawns
Soils on which your lawn sits get compacted over time. Walking on the soil compacts it and eliminates air within the soil particles. More so, the water drainage gets more miserable with the compaction.
The result is waterlogging, which in the long run, affects the soil PH and may adversely affect lawn-grass growth at its extremes.
Once you aerate regularly, the soil PH and lawn-grass growth improve. For best results after aeration, consider while the soil moisture is high and coincides with the active increase of the lawn- grass.
Avoid aerating soils that are dry and also hard. It’s best to aerate around spring and for summers, aerate after watering the lawns.
Need a lawn aerator? We’ve got you covered. Here are the five best lawn aerators:
5. Avoid Late Watering
Lawns can do well within areas where rainfall is adequate, and it coincides with proper soil drainage.
If your lawn is within areas of prevalently dry conditions, irrigation should be part of your maintenance tasks. Also, summers and their long dry spells may require you water your lawns regularly to help them stay green.
Always carry out the watering very early in the mornings.
The cold temperatures of the morning allow for optimal seepage of water into the rooting strata of the soil.
More so, the early sunshine allows the excess water to evaporate. And, that minimizes the effect of too much wetness on the grass.
Allocate your schedule to allow you water once weekly (twice utmost). More frequent watering encourages shallow rooting for lawn-grass, which is equally less drought-resistant.
If you do not have an irrigation system installed for your lawn, it is not that hard to setup a DIY lawn irrigation system. Here are a few sprinklers and other irrigation-related products to help you get started.
6. Mowing the Lawn Frequently
Mowing helps your lawn shed off excess heights of the grass.
How frequently should you do it?
The best rule of thumb is to mow off a third of the average height of the grass on your lawn.
Look at it practically:
If your lawn-mower settings are to allow grass two inches, then, it should not grow past three inches high.
Home and lawn growers happen to mow their lawns every week, and mostly do it on weekends. However, most of the springs experience grass growing more vigorously. As such, you may consider a slightly higher frequency once every spun of five days.
Pro Tip:
Do not allow the grass to grow very tall.
Why?
Once it gets too tall, the mower blade strains too much at cutting the grass. You end up with a less attractively mowed lawn.
Also, correct mowing frequency helps keep away vermin like ticks and fleas. They love long grass for hideouts.
Do you own a good lawn mower? The prices have gone down steeply for the best of the best lawn mowers in the market. Whether you like electric lawn mower or a gas one, there is a good one available for your budget. Take a look at a few below:
Conclusion
Timing is everything. If you have a lawn, plan out for the feeding and weeding. Smart enough, your plan should allow for corrective schedules.
Here’s an instance. If you miss to spray weed-removal chemicals today, do it tomorrow if the warm sunny conditions show up again.
Do not postpone the tasks too unrealistically. Two-three weeks is way too late for your timings. The grass on your lawn is a living thing, requiring water, and sunshine and nutrition altogether.
If you do every maintenance task right in time, there are no other better ways to feed and weed your lawn.
