|
Feed & Weed
In the Fall
For a
GREEN Lawn
|
|
It’s easy to get motivated to get
out of the house in the springtime and do a few lawn
care chores. You’ve been cooped up in the house all
winter long, and it feels good to get outside into the
warm sunshine and get a little exercise. But by the
time fall rolls around, you’ve been mowing and trimming
the lawn all summer, and it’s easy to just kind of let
the lawn slide on into winter with as little effort as
possible.
But to get a really healthy lawn, a
few important lawn care chores—fertilizing and weed
control—are best performed in the fall. And, if you’re
at all concerned about the health of the planet, it
turns out that fall is the “greenest” time of year to
perform these tasks as well.
If you have dandelions in your lawn each spring, you can
be sure that you had |
|
Most
lawn care professionals recommend that Wyobraska lawns
receive a total of 2 pounds of actual nitrogen per 1000
square feet of lawn area each growing season—and that
about half of that amount should be put on in the
fall—during the months of September or October. An
average sized Wyobraska lawn is between 5,000 and 10,000
square feet in size, by the way. The percentage of
nitrogen by weight is the first number on a fertilizer
label, so to determine the number of pounds of actual
nitrogen in a bag of fertilizer, simply multiply the
first number on the label by the weight of the bag.
For example, a 40 pound bag of lawn fertilizer whose
label reads 15-10-15, contains 6 pounds of nitrogen (15%
X 40 pounds). |
|
Previous Articles
Fractions March 15
Yardner March 8
Urban
Legends of Trees March 22
Que
Serra, Serra March 29
Grocery Store or Garbage Dumpster Plants April 5
Planning Your Landscape Project April 12
Planting
Cool Trees April 19
Keeping
Trees Alive April 26
Thrillers, Chillers, Spillers May 03
Will
You Still Love Them May 10
Ornamental Grasses May 17
In
Memory of Cedar Trees May 24
Gardening is not Childs Play
Versatile
Viburnums June 6
Yardner Plants
June 13
2007
Garden Walk and
Blue Spruce Decline
The Birds
& Bees of Butterfly Gardening June 28
Summer
Landscaping July 5
Cutting Your Lawn Down to Size July 12
Some Like it
Hot!! July 19
When a Tree
Falls on 5th Ave
July 26
Green
Landscaping August 2
American Idol-Landscape Aug 9
Fall is
for Planting Aug 16
Is your Landscape Neat or Messy? Aug 23
The
Seeds of a good Landscape Aug 29
Big Red Fall
Color Sep 6
Fall Landscaping Tips Sept 13
2006 Articles |
|
dandelions in your lawn the
previous fall. Dandelion seeds normally germinate in
late summer and spend the fall forming a plant that will
go dormant in your lawn for the winter. You don’t see
them, because they don’t bloom in the fall, but they are
there. When these plants come out of dormancy in the
spring, they bloom quickly, making it difficult to spray
and kill them before they bloom. However, the young
dandelion plants are relatively easy to kill in your
lawn this fall with relatively low does of herbicide
because they are growing so actively and readily absorb
the herbicide.
Fall is also the best (and
“greenest”) time of year to fertilize your lawn. The
reason for this has to do with how grass plants use
fertilizer at different times of year. In the spring,
grass plants are actively trying to grow leaves
(blades)—it’s what grass does in the springtime. So
when you fertilize your lawn in the spring, it uses the
fertilizer to grow its leaves even faster and taller
than it otherwise would. If it is given a lot of
fertilizer in the spring, your lawn will even use sugars
and starches that it stored in its root system the
previous summer and fall to grow as many leaves as fast
as possible. All that springtime growing can actually
cause a lawn to weaken its root system and leave it
vulnerable to summertime drought stress and insect
attacks that would not seriously threaten a lawn with a
deep, fully-stocked root system.
By late summer and early fall,
grass plants switch over from growing leaves to storing
energy in their root system for the winter. So when
fertilizer is applied to a lawn in the fall, the grass
plants use the fertilizer to grow and expand their root
system and to fill it with as much stored plant sugars
and starches as possible. The plant will use these
stored sugars and starches to form its first green
leaves the next spring. The surest way to have the
first green lawn in your neighborhood next spring is to
fertilize your lawn this fall.
|
|
A good rule of thumb for a green
and a “green “ lawn is to water and mow as needed in the
spring and summer, and to fertilize and control weeds in
the fall.
The Key To A
Fast Lawn
From Seed
With all the new home
construction in Wyobraska, many homeowners have
seeded new lawns this fall. A key to fast
establishment of new lawns is to fertilize with
small doses of fertilizer about every two weeks
until the lawn has a uniform height, color, and rate
of growth. Wyobraska soils, especially those around
new homes, tend to be deficient in nitrogen. Thus
newly seeded lawns in Wyobraska tend to germinate
and form small, short plants which then seem to just
sit there and not grow. These small grass plants
will actually “just sit there” for a year or longer
unless they are stimulated to grow with regular
applications of nitrogen and phosphorus. I
recommend 3-4 applications of about ˝ pound of
nitrogen per 1000 square feet of newly seeded lawn
at two week intervals. I recommend using a
fertilizer with about equal amounts of nitrogen
(first number on the label) and phosphorus (second
number on the label) for this starter fertilizer.
|