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!

In the course of my regular work in land management and property maintenance, I am sometimes called on to solve problems with large acreage. One of the most common occurs when someone new to land management buys a large parcel of land without the awareness of the maintenance costs.

The cost of mowing

When there are several acres to be mowed, it can tax resources. Doing the job yourself can be a time consuming project. The cost can also be pretty high, requiring a tractor and shredder. The cost of paying someone to do the job for you can prove to be prohibitive. The price in my area runs between $25.00 and $50.00 per acre. For 20 acres of land, the median cost of hiring someone to mow three times a year, would be about $2,400.00!

Alternatives to mowing

There are a few alternatives that are less expensive, and a couple of them might even earn some extra money. Please note that this is for areas that are “pasture like”, that is, that they are reasonably level and free of debris. If your land is covered in trees, that is probably the way it should stay, but I will address this in another article.

Some of these suggestions should be fairly obvious. If you have a lot of acreage, and it costs money to maintain it, it would be wise to put the land to work for you.

Row crops

The land could be used to produce a crop. If you have the time and experience necessary, a row crop might work for you, but they can be pretty labor intensive.

Grain crops

Wheat, oats, and other grain crops could be a less labor intensive method, but it still involves some work.

Timber production

Planting trees for timber production is less labor intensive, since they do not have to be replanted and harvested each year, but the return on this relatively small investment takes several years. Still, it beats having to mow, or pay someone else to do so.

Animal husbandry

Cattle production is another possibility. It requires some expertise, and some work, but it can be done, with varying levels of profitability.

All of the things listed thus far involve a significant investment of time and money, but they can also be accomplished with the aid of others. You could allow someone to rent the property for these purposes, or allow them to produce the crop on your property for a cut of the profit. This system works very well with my next suggestion.

Make hay

This method will allow you to produce a crop on your land, with little to no labor and expense on your part, and leave you with a profit!

Find someone who bails hay for a living, and ask if they would be willing to bail your pasture land “on the halves”. That simply means, that if they bail it, you get half the hay, and they get half. If they want to fertilize the meadow, you can either split the cost with them, or see if they want to just take extra bails above your cut.

This is a really good solution because it allows you to avoid the expense of mowing, produce a crop that will be used for animal feed, and possibly make a few bucks in the process.

What to do with the hay

What do you do with all that hay? Well, you can use it, or you can sell it. There is a pretty good chance that the guy who bails it will either want it for himself, and be willing to pay you, or he probably knows someone who does. Don’t have any way to transport it? That’s ok too. most people who buy hay have the equipment to do the job. Even if you sell your half of the hay at lower than market price, you will still make some money, and you will have saved the cost of having to have your pasture mowed, and together, that equals a pretty good profit!

Hay production example

If your 20 acre pasture made 4 rolls per acre per season, that would be 80 rolls, your part would be 40 rolls multiplied by the price for bail, which we will figure at $30.00, would be $1,200.00. $1,200.00 profit, plus $2,400.00 savings on mowing costs, leaves you $3,600.00 better off each year. And that is nothing to sneeze at!

Chemical mowing

There are chemical treatments that will leave your pasture land with growing grass, without the need to mow more than once a year, and still leave the wildlife living in it, in place. These methods involve very small amounts of herbicide which stunt the growth of the plants for a few months. Oddly, if you are concerned with wildlife, the chemical option is probably the best. Mowing takes out al lot of small animals. The cost of such a program is usually about the same as one mowing.

See also: Mowing Options Chemical Mowing