6 Steps To Make Your Lawn The Best On The Block This Spring

1. Get the leaves from the fall off your lawn

This is something we always procrastinate to do during the winter, because let’s face facts, raking leaves in the freezing cold isn’t fun. But since we all put if off for later, it’s time to get those brown autumn leaves off the lawn. You can certainly rake them if you prefer, but we recommend mulching your leaves with a lawnmower, and we’ve already outlined this entire process in a previous blog post, here. Do not skip this step. It’s important to have all the leaves off your lawn before you move on to the other steps. 

2. Overseed the lawn

If you didn’t do it in the fall, overseeding in early spring can still yield great results for your lawn. Locate any patchy spots in your lawn where grass isn’t growing. These are the places you’ll want to overseed. Make sure to loosen the soil first, which you can do with a simple ground breaker. If you don’t have a ground breaker. A garden hoe will usually work fine. You’ll also want to overseed over places where it seems like the grass is dying. Try your best to clear out all the dying grass first by raking over the area. It’s best not to rake it all up; it’s better to just try to get up the top layer of thatch. You’ll then want to loosen the soil the same way we describe above. Once you’re done, you can spread fresh grass seed over the patch. Give the freshly laid grass seed a good first watering. 

3. De-weed the yard

This can be a delicate process. The safest way to de-weed your lawn will be to pull up the weeds by hand. If you do it this way, make sure you have a good pair of gardening gloves. Pulling up weeds can hurt your hands if you have sensitive skin and you’re not careful. That said, sometimes pulling up all the weeds would be way too time-consuming or too hard depending on how deeply rooted the weeds are. If this is the case, you’ll need to consider other methods. You can actually easily burn weeds in your yard with a propane weed torch. Use this method with caution. You don’t want to burn yourself, any surrounding plants, or the fresh grass around it (although replacing burned grass is a relatively easy process). If you don’t want to use a weed torch, then your last bet is to use chemical herbicides. This should be a last resort, because using this method can easily kill surrounding grass and shrubbery. It’s best to exhaust the first two methods before trying this one. 

4. Fertilize the grass

This is a relatively easy process, but it’s important to do it at the right time. The rule of thumb is generally around the last week of March, or right after the first time you mow the lawn for spring. Spread an even coat of fertilizer around the entire lawn. Keep in mind, for best results, you’ll want to do this a few times before fall, usually around 5 or 6, or approximately once every six weeks. Some people understandably worry about whether they’ll have to smell the fertilizer they spread on their lawn. Don’t worry! Fertilizer usually stops smelling in a couple days! But if you’d rather not deal with the smell at all, there are lots of great fertilizers on the market that don’t have any manure in them, and barely have an odor at all! 

5. Get ready to mow... A LOT!

This may seem obvious, but it’s a mistake that too many homeowners make these days. In fact, if you only mow your lawn once a week during spring (or even less) you’re actually doing more harm to your lawn then good. You’ll want to keep the grass nice and short during spring, not just for the aesthetic, but so the grass grows better! Believe it or not, allowing the grass to get too tall actually stunts its growth. So, a good rule of thumb is to mow your lawn once every five days for the first six weeks of the spring season. This will get your grass growing magnificently! 

6. And finally... DON’T water the lawn!

Okay, this might seem counterintuitive, but there’s a very good reason you don’t want to water your lawn in early spring. First of all, in the Northern Hemisphere, springtime is already the rainiest time of the year anyway, so your lawn is going to get plenty of water already, and you never want to overwater a lawn. But there’s a far more important reason you’ll want to hold off on this until late spring or even early summertime: watering your grass too early may make your grassroots grow too shallow! Shallow root growth will make your lawn prone to drying out and going brown during the summertime. What a tragedy that would be after all your hard work! A good rule of thumb for your first watering is when you notice your grass start to show signs of wilt for the first time. So, for a beautiful lawn in the spring and summer, just remember these two things: water too early, grassroots grow too shallow; and first signs of wilt, first time you water! 

And there you have it! If you follow these six simple steps, it may be your lawn that all your neighbors drive by this spring in a state of total envy... and you’ll deserve it! This takes a lot of work and patience, but it will be well worth it in the end. Having the perfect lawn is the dream of basically every homeowner, and now you have all the information you need to get you there. So, grab your lawnmower, grass seed, rake and garden gloves, and get going! Good luck, and remember, if you’re missing any necessary equipment, we have everything you need right here at Kefauver Lumber True Value! Stop by today, and we’ll make sure you walk out with everything you need to make sure your lawn looks beautiful this spring.