Lawn care and lawn pest control

In this, like most other activities, balance is the key. Balancing your lawns water and fertilizer needs with your mowing schedule, and balancing the right mowing height between too long and too short, will give your lawn the best look, and the best health. The best defense against insects, disease, fungus, and weeds is a healthy lawn. Like a healthy body, a healthy lawn will ward off attacks by invaders. Proper lawn care will give you a healthy lawn, which will in turn, give you, the best lawn pest control.

The list below gives a few details about  lawn care, as it relates to lawn pest control.

• Scalping your lawn, weakens the scalped area’s turf, and allows weed invaders to take the place of the weakened grass.
• Not mowing the grass at a low enough level, leaves cover for insects and allows some low growing weeds to reproduce seed under the mowing height.
• Thatch hides insects, and should be removed or cultivated, and not allowed to build up. Good mowing practices will stop it from building.
• Waiting too long between mowings, can allow weeds time to reach seed head maturity, and plant themselves in your nice green lawn. Too much growth also provides cover for insects.
• When you have waited too long to mow, change your mowing height, so that you take off less leaf blade, and then mow again in a few days at a lower cutting height. Do this in increments until you reach your desired cutting height.
• You should never remove more than one third of the top at a time. Taking too much off at once will leave your lawn in a weakened condition, inviting more bugs and weeds to take over.
• Avoid mowing weedy outside areas before you mow your lawn. If you have to do this for some reason, stop and thoroughly clean your mower between the two areas.
• Mow away from your landscape beds and toward your lawn. Care should be taken to avoid throwing grass, weed clippings, and seed into them.
• Don’t “over water” your lawn and landscape beds. Many weedy lawn pests, and bug pests enjoy excess water, and may decide to take up residence in the new sea side resort in your landscape. Over watering fuels fungus, and bacteria as well.
• Over fertilization leads to most of the same lawn care problems as over watering.
• Don’t fertilize your lawn too late in the year. If you do, you may be fertilizing winter weeds instead of grass. This will have a bad effect on your lawn pest control efforts in the spring.
• Avoid aerifying late in the fall. Aerifying at that time, will plant the weed seeds that would have otherwise rotted on top of the ground.
• Avoid lawn compaction. Areas with heavy foot traffic, are likely to have poor quality turf, and are subject to invasion by weeds that like compacted areas. If you have compaction, loosen it by aerifying.
• If the problem is human pests, and an area is getting so much traffic because it is convenient to walk in that direction, a good lawn care tactic might be to add a paved foot path through the area, or you could plant or build a traffic barrier to make it less convenient.

Good lawn care is great lawn pest control. See more on lawn care and lawn pest control on our lawn management pages.

The best lawn treatment for any lawn, is to make sure that the lawn is healthy. No amount of any other lawn treatment can overcome the damage done by poor cultural practices. No lawn treatment known to man can benefit a lawn as much as good cultural practices!

What are cultural practices? They are the practices used to maintain a lawn. The day to day activities performed in lawn care. This includes such things as mowing, cultivating, fertilizing, irrigating, and yes, even lawn treatment practices.

Lawn treatment and cultural practices

Mowing as a lawn treatment

Mowing is the biggest part of, and the primary activity in lawn care. Mowing frequency has more to do with the health of a lawn than any other activity for producing a healthy lawn. There are still plenty of other cultural practices.

Your lawn needs air, water, nutrients, and an easy way to get them all into the root zone where those plants can make use of them. With that in mind, we will start with lawn cultivating. There is no need in fertilizing and irrigating if the ground is so compacted that it has no air space. Air, nutrients, and water can’t get into the root zone if there is no space for them to occupy. They will just run off into the drainage system. Cultivating will provide the needed space.

Cultivation as a lawn treatment.

Cultivating is not needed as often as the other items on our list, but it is a very important part of lawn treatment.

If you have a thatch build up, or compaction problems, aerifying, or verticutting will aid in keeping your lawn in good condition. Thatch hides insects and provides conditions which encourage insect reproduction. It also weakens the lawn grasses, deprives them of natural nutrients, and inhibits water intake.

If your lawn is in need of renovating, cultivation is essential. Top dressing could be a separate subject, but I mention it here because cultivation and top dressing are usually a collaborative efforts. Cultivating twice per year will have a positive impact on your law, and more frequent cultivation in high stress areas can work wonders. Avoid cultivating your lawn late in the fall. It will plant weed seed that would have otherwise rotted on the surface.

Fertilizing as a lawn treatment.

Getting the right amount of nutrients to your lawn is important. For the best fertilizer, mow more frequently, which will leave smaller, more easily broken down clippings, and don’t bag your clippings They can return as much as 60 percent of the nutrients to the soil. Of course, you will want to add more fertilizer, so start with something like one pound of nitrogen per thousand square feet of lawn space per application. Three applications per year should be sufficient.

Of course you will need to adjust this to the needs of your particular lawn. Most common lawn grasses can use as much as two pounds per thousand square feet, per application.

Some fertilizers use sulfur coated urea formaldehyde. The sulfur coating slows the release of nutrients, allowing for more time between applications. You can use these at higher levels, less frequently. If you use regular fertilizer, smaller doses at more frequent intervals are recommended. Organic and natural fertilizers can also work very well, and are usually slow release.

Irrigation as a lawn treatment

Keeping your grass healthy requires making the right amount of water available. Too little and it desiccates, to much and it will languish and invite fungus, pests, and disease. To have a healthy lawn, you don’t have to know all the details of precipitation rates, or evapotranspiration rates (yes, they are real terms) but you should watch your lawn. If it is soggy two hours after watering, you should probably back off the water a little. If it is dry at a depth of one inch, you should increase the watering.

Pest Control.

This is what most people mean when they talk about lawn treatment, but, if you have done everything else on the list right, the chances of having pest problems is greatly diminished. Pest control products for standard lawn treatment fall into 2 categories, insecticides and herbicides.

Insecticides

Insects need food and cover to survive, if you have done your mowing well, set your irrigation properly, not over fertilized, and gotten rid of thatch through proper cultivation, you have removed the source of food and cover. If there are problems at all, they will be few. Lawn treatment with the least toxic insecticide when any outbreaks occur will solve the problem easily. There are also systemic lawn treatment products available that work well. Always try to start with the least toxic lawn treatment first.

Herbicides

Weeds compete with lawn grasses where cultural practices have broken down. Scalping causes bare spots, and with no competition, weeds invade the bare spots, mowing weedy outside areas, and then mowing your fine lawn without cleaning the mower between spreads weed seed, overly wet, or overly dry soil allows weeds of one type or another to prosper. Poor mowing frequency gives weeds time to go to seed. Conversely, good cultural practices prevent weeds, and are the best lawn treatment for getting rid of weeds.  Herbicidal lawn treatments should be little needed if proper cultural practices are followed.

Treatment for existing weeds

To eliminate the weeds that exist, find the least toxic method, starting with manual removal if possible. Otherwise, find the proper herbicide for your particular weed, and follow the label directions exactly, and follow up by using good lawn cultural practices to prevent the weeds from returning.

The best lawn treatment a healthy lawn!

If there is a secret to the perfect lawn, it is this: Mow often!

Mowing often offers many advantages, frequent mowing:

• Removes less blade leaf each time, so the grass suffers less shock.
• Encourages lateral growth of tillers and stolons, which thickens the turf.
• Reduces the need for water.
• Decreases fertilizer needs since smaller clippings revert to nitrogen quickly.
• Prevents weeds from gaining a foothold since it creates a healthier lawn, and cuts the weeds off before they have a chance to produce seed.
• Decrease thatch.
• Reduces the chances of attack by fungus.
• Reduces cover for insects.
• For these reasons, frequent mowing reduces the need for herbicides, insecticides, fungicides.

With the need for less fertilizer, water, and pesticide, mowing frequency also saves you money!