9 Cool Season Lawn Care Tips to Make Your Lawn the Envy of Your Neighborhood

Cardinal Lawn Care ~ Taking Care of Lawns in Arnold and Pevely, MO Since 2010

Did you know that fall is the best time of year to take care of your lawn grass?

Matter of fact, cool season grasses, such as Kentucky bluegrasses and fescues, grace Missouri lawns since our winters are cold. And cool season grasses do best when they get some TLC in the fall.

In this blog post, you’ll learn four tips that you can do before the first freeze and why you need to hire a lawn care company to take care of the rest.

4 Lawn Care Tips for You

When you hire a lawn service to work on your Imperial, MO property, you’re entering a partnership. Our lawn care company uses specially trained technicians to perform expert tasks to give you a healthy, thick lawn.

Your job is to make sure you follow all instructions left by your tech as well as complete other duties to ensure that you develop a beautiful lawn that is the envy of your neighborhood.

Here are those four lawn care tips for you:

1. Watering your lawn: Making sure that your lawn gets adequate water is solely in your domain. If you want to maintain a gorgeous lawn, you should invest in an irrigation system. Yes, the upfront cost is large, but your return on investment comes in lower water bills and a healthy lawn.

   Plus, you can set up your sprinkler system to turn off and on at certain times, add moisture and weather sensors to save water, and use smart technology so you can operate your sprinkler system from the comfort of your home or office.If you recently had your lawn overseeded, you need to keep watering it until the first freeze. Your lawn service tech can guide you on how much water and what time of day is best to irrigate your newly planted lawn.

2. Raking leaves: Right now, the leaves are falling. And while it’s fun to jump into a pile of leaves, it’s not a good idea to allow leaves to stay on your lawn over the winter. By doing so, you’re opening up your yard grass to fungal diseases or even killing your grass come next spring.

3. Grass- and leaf-cycling: Do you want to give your lawn an extra boost of nitrogen and other minerals? Mulch your grass clippings and leaves. By mulching these leftovers, you give your lawn an extra dose of nitrogen that helps your lawn survive over the winter.

4. Hire a professional lawn care company to put your lawn to bed for the winter: For example, if you have compacted soil or bare patches on your yard, you need core aeration to help it breathe again, as well as you need overseeding services to fill in those bare spots.

How a Professional Lawn Service Helps You with Fall Lawn Tasks

Even if your lawn is looking good, it doesn’t hurt to have a professional evaluate and suggest services that will make your yard the envy of your community.

For example, you may not have bare spots on your lawn, but you may have compacted soil. A lawn service can still aerate your soil to loosen it up and add top dressing to give it an extra boost of nutrition and to keep the soil loose.

Here are some other fall services your lawn care company can do for you:

1. Overseed your lawn: Typically overseeding happens at the same time as core aeration. Using a slit seeder, your technician will plant grass seed that will germinate in 10 days as long as you keep watering it. Your tech will also add a layer of compost or top dressing to provide nutrition to the grass seedlings.

Read more about core aeration and overseeding in this blog post.

2. Mow your lawn: Your lawn still needs to be cut until late November. You don’t want your yard grass to get long and bend under the weight of snow and ice. This scenario leads to fungal diseases in the spring.

Plus, your mowing service keeps their blades sharp and will cut the last mow a little shorter than usual to prevent spring mold from forming.

3. Fertilize your lawn: If you don’t fertilize your lawn in the spring or any other time during the growing season, you should have a fertilizer application in the fall. This treatment will help your grass plants develop strong roots to get food and moisture from the soil during the winter. And while your lawn may not be growing, your yard grass’s crowns and roots are still alive under the snow.

4. Pre-emergent weed control: Get a head start on forming that barrier between the soil and crabgrass seeds. Yes, crabgrass seeds do germinate in the fall. The cold weather slows the degradation of the weed control so that the barrier stays in place into early spring.

Read more about pre-emergent crabgrass control in this blog post.

5. De-thatching: Fall is the best time to de-thatch too. After a hot summer, your cool season lawn may develop thatch that is over a ½” deep. Some thatch is good, but too much prevents nutrition, light, air and water from penetrating to the soil below. Your lawn care pro will use power rakes to loosen the thatch.

By partnering with a professional lawn service, your property can look its best for next spring. Plus, your property value increases when you invest in your lawn’s health and maintenance.

At Cardinal Lawn Care, we provide all of these lawn services. Right now, we have a special for new customers coming on board in 2018. Sign up now for our lawn care services and get two free treatments.

Act now, this offer ends on December 1, 2018!

If you want your Pevely lawn to look its best, you need Cardinal Lawn Care. Call us today at (314) 686-3907 or fill out our contact form.