How Can I Get A Dark Green Lawn
The best and fastest way to obtain a dark green lawn to show off to your guests and neighbors is to feed your lawn a fast-release nitrogen fertilizer, and apply a liquid iron product. The fertilizer should be applied a week prior and the liquid chelated iron should be applied 3-5 days prior to your event.
Use Natural Lawn Fertilizers
Why use natural fertilizers instead of synthetic lawn fertilizers? Because they are better for your grass, the environment, and they are proven to work better than synthetics! A recent study by Austins Watershed Protection and Development Review Department, with the collaboration of Texas A& M, showed that organic and natural lawn fertilizers actually produce greener lawns than synthetics. Moreover, natural fertilizers are healthier for your family and for the environment! There are a number of natural lawn fertilizers to choose from. You can browse them here.
How To Apply Iron Lawn Supplements
The best time to apply iron to your lawn is in the spring, when temperatures are in the 60s to 70s F. Avoid spraying or applying iron during hot weather. Follow package instructions exactly, to prevent overdosing.
Grasses dont require a lot of iron, and its generally not needed unless your soil test indicates an iron deficiency. If your lawn is yellow, first make sure its getting enough water and regular nutrients before trying iron supplements.
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Apply Iron Only As Needed
Grass usually doesnt need a large amount of iron. In fact, its usually only beneficial to apply extra iron if you have a soil test indicating iron deficiency.
Dont automatically assume an iron deficiency is the cause of your lawn yellowing or being light in color.
First, ensure that its sufficiently watered and has all other major nutrients. If those dont work, you can consider using iron supplements, but your best way to know for sure what your lawn is lacking and how to improve performance is to perform a soil test. This is the one I use. I order it from Amazon every spring and let those results guide me in applying the right products each year.
Get Your Lawn In Training
To build a strong, healthy lawn it is important not to water it too frequently. Its all about training your lawn to develop a deep root system that will see it through the summer months without the need to switch on a sprinkler every day. To get the roots of your lawn searching for water at a deeper level, you’ll need to give it a long soak two to three times per week, rather than a short daily soak. This is not helpful as it will only help to create a shallow root system.
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Water Your Lawn Deeply And Less Often
Turning your sprinkler on for just a few minutes a few times a week really wont do much to help your lawn. For a healthier lawn, learn to water your grass deeply and less often. If you water infrequently and deeply, the roots of your grass will start to grow deeper down into the soil. This helps your grass stay green during periods of drought or extremely hot weather. Experts recommend that you water your grass with 1 inch of water, once a week. This amount of course can vary depending on your local weather conditions, soil type, grass species, etc.
How do you know if youre watering your plants with 1 inch of water? You can use this simple test. Place a series of shallow containers throughout your lawn and turn your sprinklers on. Keep watering until you measure 1 inch of water in the majority of the containers.
This simple test will also help you determine if your sprinklers are watering your grass evenly. If the depth of the water in the containers varies widely, this may explain patches of drier grass in your yard. In this case youll need to adjust your sprinkler heads. Its also important that you dont over-water your grass.
Youll know when its time to water again when the first 3-4 inches of soil are dry to the touch. Use an electronic soil tester to test the soil moisture, or use a trowel or a screwdriver to open the soil and feel it with your finger. To help your grass retain even more water, you can use water absorbing polymers .
Why Is It Important To Fertilize Your Lawn
Fertilizer is essentially food for your lawn. Just like any other living organism, grass needs food and water in order to grow
Grass gets its food from the soil, but after awhile, the grass eats up all of the nutrients there are in the soil. By fertilizing your lawn, you putting soil back into the ground for grass. A fertilized lawn is noticably different than one that isnt. Its greener and more full of grass with fewer bare patches. It also grows faster. If you dont fertilize your lawn, weeds will eventually overtake the grass, and youll have to completely resod your lawn if if gets too
In addition to fertilizing your lawn, you should also recycle grass clippings into the lawn when mowing using a mulching blade. The clippings will decompose and provide some amounts of natural fertilizer to your lawn.
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When Can You Add Iron To Your Lawn
You can add iron to your lawn just about any time of year. If youre applying iron spray to newly planted grass, the key is to do so when the temperatures have cooled. When its hot and the sun is intense, iron can burn new, young grass leaves. If youre working with an established lawn, or anticipating application of iron during cooler months, you should be in good shape if you adhere to the instructions of the element itself.
Control Lawn Weeds Insects & Diseases
All of the tips above help create the best lawn possible to ensure thicker, greener grass. This naturally reduces weeds, insects and diseases. However, these pesky lawn invaders are always lurking, waiting for the opportunity to infiltrate your lawn if it shows any signs of weakness.
Sometimes, certain conditions can lead to some weed breakthroughs or an excessively wet season can result in turf disease. Keeping an eye out for these challenges and managing them quickly can make simple problems disappear versus exacerbate into bigger, more visually unpleasing results.
A lawn care pro can offer solutions such as a combination of pre-emergent and post-emergent weed control tactics to keep all weeds at bay. Nothing blemishes thick, green grass faster than weeds, insects, and diseases.
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Final Thoughts On How To Make Your Lawn Green
If this seems like a lotdont stress it. Were here to help. Feel free to give us a call at any time to talk about how to make your neighbors green with envy because of a lawn thats just as green! Also, if you have any other tried and tested tips for supporting healthy grass, let us know in the comments!
Pro Strategies For Thicker Greener Grass
For many Central and Southern Maryland homeowners, a green grass shows they care for and have pride in their properties.
In summers heat, its especially important to do all of the things all year long that contribute to a lawns health. Because, as the pros know, you cant do just one thing to nurture a thick lawn. A mix of the right strategies is necessary when it comes to how to make grass greener.
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Two Weeks To A Greener Lawn
Its the hottest month of the year and my lawn is brown and yucky! Or at least it was until I decided to do something about it. This is that patch of flat lawn in our backyard where the kids kick the soccer ball, play badminton, capture insects, and play with their friends, but it was getting prickly under their feet and becoming such an eyesore. Our front lawn stays nice and healthy, but this one in the rear yard was looking really sad.
I went down to my local True Value to see what I could find in their garden department. The store manager recommended ammonium sulfate for a quick fix to green it up again, applied in the evening after the hot sun fades and given a healthy watering to dissolve the granules. Knowing little about lawn fertilizers, I took his advice.
I was surprised how quickly the lawn turned lush and green again, I had it in the back of my mind somehow that these things take a lot of time, but the ammonium sulfate was a great quick fix heres the result two weeks later.
For long term health we will need to follow up with a slow release formula in a few weeks for now were enjoying the lusher, darker feels good under the feet grass.
The much improved lawn has met with feline approval.
And Im happy to report the kids are back in action, enjoying the last days of summer and having fun ignoring social norms for bathing suits when jumping in sprinklers. 🙂
Types Of Iron Lawn Supplements
There are two main types of iron supplements:
- Synthetic Iron Fertilizer: Manufactured iron rich fertilizers, such as Ironite, are an inexpensive and fast-acting supplement. They are usually spread as granules, with foliar sprays also available that can produce results within days. The disadvantage of synthetic iron fertilizers is that they can turn your lawn gray if over applied, and if youre not careful when spreading, they will stain your concrete driveway a rusty-orange.
- Organic Iron Fertilizer: Organic sources of iron, such as Milorganite and greensand, are slower to break down, but the iron is naturally chelated, which makes it more readily absorbed by the plants. Organic iron sources wont stain your concrete, and they contain other nutrients that naturally build up your soil and lawn.
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A Final Note On Over Fertilizing
When it comes to applying fertilizer to your lawn, less can be more. Be sure to follow the instructions, and also consult your local turfgrass extension on what your lawn actually needs.
Too much fertilizer and youll get what is known as nitrogen burn. If you see large patches of yellow in your lawn , chances are youve over-fertilized. Theres no way to fix this other than to wait, and youve weakened the grass. So follow the instructions, wait the allotted time between applications, and be patient.
Green grass doesnt come in the first application. But when fertilized routinely, grass will be stronger, greener and thicker than ever before.
How Do I Green Up My Lawn In Summer
Relative availability of various nutrients at different pH levels.
Its July and your lawn looks dull and yellowish. Whats the harm in putting a few pounds of fertilizer down to green it up? Well, if youre not careful about timing, quantity or fertilizer content, you could cause serious damage to your lawn.
When to fertilize depends on if your lawn is made up of cool season grass or warm season grass. Cool season grasses look best when the weather is cooler: fall, winter and spring. In times of hot, dry weather they can go dormant. Warm season grasses thrive in hot summer conditions, but go semi- to completely dormant in winter.
For cool season grasses, chemical fertilizer applications should stop between mid-March and mid-September, the ideal time of application being October, November and February. Warm season grasses should be fertilized from the time of green up in spring through September. So, if your lawn is a warm season grass go ahead and fertilize in summer to keep it nice and green.
Cool season grasses have some issues when it comes to fertilizing in summer. Excess nitrogen can make a lawn much more susceptible to brown patch. It can cause rapid growth, meaning youll have to mow more frequently And if you use too much or apply when the temperatures are too high, you can burn or even kill the grass.
And remember, nothing will revive color in a fully summer-dormant lawn but cooler temperatures and irrigation.
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Top Tips For A Healthy Lawn
A green and healthy lawn is easy to achieve with a bit of work. A little effort now will save you a lot of effort later, because healthy lawns are less vulnerable to pests, weeds, drought, and other problems.
Follow these seven tips:
Drought Stress Or Lack Of Water
Your grass needs water to thrive. When your lawn isnt receiving enough water, it can start to wilt and ultimately turn pale green or yellow.
PRO TIP: Its critical that you get on a proper watering schedule. Its common for people to underestimate just how much water their lawn is receiving from Mother Nature. A brief thunderstorm may seem like it delivers a lot of rain, but it doesnt soak down very far to your turfs roots, where its truly needed. On top of that, people get busy and forget to water their lawn. But your lawn needs approximately 1 to 2 inches of water per week to thrive and remain a healthy green.
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Different Types Of Miracle
There are two types of miracle-gro fertilizer that you can use on your lawn. The Miracle-Gro lawn food and the Miracle-Gro all-purpose fertilizer. The whole difference between these two types of fertilizer is the ratio of the nutrients. The recommended ratio of fertilizer for the lawn is 3-1-2 or 4-1-2. These numbers are the ratio of nutrients N-P-K. The N is nitrogen, P is phosphorus and the K is potassium.
- Miracle-Gro Lawn Food Miracle-Gro lawn food fertilizer is specially made for lawns but it is usually used for new lawns as it has a very high ratio of nitrogen in it compared to recommended fertilizer which is 36-0-6 or in simplest form 6-0-1. So using this fertilizer in high quantities on a normal lawn can burn the grass and ruin the whole lawn. It is used in the new lawn as nitrogen boosts the grass growth and helps the lawn to establish well and makes it very easy for the seed to germinate in the soil.
- Miracle-Gro All Purpose Fertilizer Miracle-Gro all-purpose fertilizer is as the name suggests is made for every plant, garden, and lawn. The ratio of Miracle-Gro all-purpose is 24-8-16 which reduces to 3-1-2 which is also the recommended ratio application of fertilizer to an established and growing lawn. So using Miracle-Gro All Purpose is better than using the specific lawn fertilizer.
When & When Not To Add Iron To Your Lawn To Keep It Green
If your lawn is suffering from a yellow or brown tint, there are several reasons you may not be seeing green. For the most part, yellow grass is caused from a lack of nutrients that would otherwise facilitate healthy growth. Chlorosis, for example, is a condition that occurs when the green chlorophyll in the grass leaf tissue is unable to develop. Iron and nitrogen are key nutrients that keep your lawn looking its finest, and if the roots are unable to absorb these valuable elements, youll almost assuredly find yourself with an unpleasant-looking lawn.
To keep things looking green, iron additives are often a vital resource in our high-desert Arizona climate, but rest assured, there are dos and donts to the application process. Heres a brief run-down on how to determine if you have a lawn iron deficiency.
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Choosing A Lawn Care Company
If you don’t want to do it yourself, there are many companies that maintain lawns and control pests. Some may include services marketed as organic or pesticide-free.
To choose the option best for you:
- Find out what programs and prices companies in your area offer, and what results you can expect.
- Avoid lawn care programs that apply pesticides even when pests are not present.
- If pesticides are used, make sure that they are used as part of an Integrated Pest Management program.
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Include A Mix Of Plants
Be sure to include a mix of many different plants and grasses in your lawn. A diverse landscape is better for the environment and can be easier to maintain, because it prevents pest problems from spreading to the whole lawn.
For places where it is hard to grow a lawn, try plants more adapted to the area. See Plant diversity for more information.
