Lawn garden care, hot tips and great ideas!



Welcome to our page all about lawn garden care. Here we discuss starting from square one, planting the seed, fertilizers, weed control and lawn aeration. This page is jam packed,so please enjoy and lets create a beautiful lawn together.

lovely lawn

Above- a great example of a well kept lawn

Lawn garden care, Starting From Square One.

Just because it’s easier, let’s assume that you have no grass at all or that your grass is mostly dead and you need to start from square one. There are many, many people out there who have had their homes built and now are faced with a patch of dirt where grass should be.

If you’re like me, however, you may already have a lawn, but there are many, many dead patches all around the yard that need worked on. Well, we can work on that as well!

All you need to start with is a little grass seed and a little know how!

There are literally hundreds of grass seeds to choose from when you are trying to figure out what you want your yard to look like. Believe it or not, all of these various grasses can make your lawn look a different way.

What we’re trying to say is that grass isn’t just grass. There are different colors of green, different ways the grass lays, different ways the grass grows. Depending on what you’re looking for, choosing the right grass for your lifestyle and preference can make all the difference in having a lawn you can be proud of.

The first thing you need to do before choosing a grass seed is to prepare the land. If you have a bare patch of land, all that entails is to till up the area until you have a fine powder of dirt. Then till that area again until the powder is even more powdery. Then you can be assured you have a great place for your grass to grow!

What do you do, though, if you have patches that need to be filled in? Actually, you need to do much the same thing. Till up each piece of land until you have a soil that looks blockular and small. In either situation, once you have the land tilled up, you’ll need to add in a little bit of fertilizer to make the ground more receptive to the seed it will be receiving. We’ll address specific fertilizers a little bit later, but you need to find one that will help you achieve your desired results.

Lawn garden care, Planting The Seed.

The way you plant your grass seed depends on what shape your current lawn is in. You need to evaluate your situation and go from there!

If you have a new home and this is the first lawn a few things are different. Mainly you will have to do clean up and get the proper grade before working on seeding. Once this is done you will have to till up the ground to make a soft seed bed. After tilling fertilize, and seed just as described above using the same amount of seed. Then, cover the entire lawn with straw.

Shake out straw to cover approximately 50% of the soil from view. After done you should be able to look down and still see about half of the soil showing through the straw, no more. This equates to about 100 bales per acre.

After you’re done laying down the straw it's time to start watering. Soak the lawn until runoff the first watering, followed by daily watering of sufficient length to keep the soil wet. If it dries out, the seed won't germinate.

Another option for your new lawn is to buy patches of sod. Sod can be a quick answer to aesthetic beauty, but be prepared to pay a pretty penny for this choice.

There are two integral elements of growing and maintaining a lush, green lawn. Those elements are watering and fertilizing.

There is also a whole section in our e-book on seeding an existing lawn if you are not starting from scratch.

Stumpy's red hot tip Australia has a fantastic organic fertilizer named Organic life. If you can get it, use it!

Stumpy the garden gnome

Lawn garden care, Fertilizers

Your lawn consists of thousands and thousands of tiny little plants that group together closely to form patches of grass. To improve your lawn garden care the grass needs fertilizer to grow and be healthy. We know we need to fertilize our garden and house plants, but often lawn garden care is overlooked. A green lawn needs food to grow and thrive.

Fertilizer is any material supplying one or more essential plant nutrients. Most common turf grass fertilizers include nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, but they may also include other essential mineral elements for turf grass growth.

Fertilizers do more than make your lawn green. They help the grass grow too, but there’s a little more involved. Fertilizer will help grass seed germinate quicker and get started out of the ground. After the plants have established, fertilizer will make the grass thicker and healthier.

The most common questions asked by homeowners regarding fertilizers is how much and when. Generally speaking, most lawns will need four applications of fertilizer per year.

What type of fertilizer should you use? Well, the answer depends on you and your needs. However, there are two basic types: complete and balanced.

Complete fertilizers contain nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, but they may also include other essential minerals elements for turf grass growth.

Complete fertilizers contain nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium in the same product. If a fertilizer contains less than all three elements it is referred to as an incomplete fertilizer. If urea, a 46-0-0 incomplete fertilizer, is used for every application through the season, lower turf quality may result if other essential elements are not being supplied by the soil. Balanced fertilizers provide nutrients in a predetermined ratio that best meets the plant's requirements for those elements. Turf grasses require nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium in the approximate ratio of 3-1-2, 4-1-2, or 8-1-3.

Remember that the right balanced fertilizer ratio will differ with grass type, and is also influenced by soil levels of certain elements

You may want to get a slow-release fertilizer that lets their nutrients out slowly over a period of time. These fertilizers are commercially produced and available at most home stores.

Because these lawn fertilizers release there nutrients over time, rather than all at once, you're essentially stretching out the feeding. As nutrients are released, the root system of your grass fills in any bare patches. This in itself promotes lawn weed control, depriving weed seeds of a place to germinate.

lawn weeds

Lawn garden care, Weed Control

Unfortunately, there’s a lot more growing in your lawn than just grass. In lawn garden care controlling weeds in a new or existing lawn is vital to the health and overall appearance of the lawn.

A beautiful smooth lawn gets most of its good looks from the fact that it is smooth and level with no weeds sticking up above the turf. You have probably mowed your lawn before only to have dandelions popping up above the grass a day later making it look like you need to mow already.

A weed free lawn holds its good looks for several days if the grass is a monoculture with uniform growing heights.

Weeds are really just one type of plant that we have decided shouldn't be growing in one particular place. It's your point of view as to what makes a weed a weed.

Some weed-type plants are invasive and fast growing. Their growth habit overtakes our cultivated turf plants, depriving them of food and water. Other weeds are extremely noxious and cause problems for humans if they get close them.

In the lawn, the most common weeds are just a nuisance. Most don't cause skin reactions or breathing difficulties, they just don't look good.

What they're also telling us is that the lawn isn't as healthy as it should be. Turf grasses today are so adept at growing into thick masses, that if maintained properly, weeds are not a problem. It is when the lawn isn't as healthy as it could be that we see weeds becoming a problem for the lawn.

Lawn garden care (weeds)

To treat for weeds in your lawn, you have to understand the type of weed that you have. Since different type weeds require different types of treatment. We’ll go through some of the more common types of weeds and give you some advice how to control them in our lawn garden care e-book below at the bottom of the page.

Lawn garden care, Aerating Your Lawn

The basic idea behind lawn garden care aeration is that, like you, your lawn and the soil under it need to breathe. Providing much-needed lawn aeration for your grass entails dealing with thatch. Soils can become compacted in high-traffic areas or in areas that have mostly clay soils. This can kill off grass very quickly.

Lawn thatch is the layer of dead turf grass tissue between the green vegetation and the soil surface that must be removed (a process known as "de-thatching") to maintain lawn health. Lawn thatch is derived from stems, leaves, stolons, rhizomes and roots.

The build-up of lawn thatch makes it difficult for your lawn to breathe. Lawn aeration performed in spring or fall helps control lawn thatch. You should have your lawn aerated once a year.

The process of lawn aeration can be as simple as poking holes in the soil throughout the lawn by walking over the lawn with spiked shoes such as golf shoes. You should also faithfully remove as much lawn thatch as you can in fall by raking deeply, rather than just skimming the autumn leaves off the top of the lawn.

Lawn aeration also reduces soil compaction, allowing water and fertilizer to permeate into the root zone. Grassy areas submitted to constant foot traffic require lawn aeration more frequently.

Lawn aeration may be undertaken in the spring, as soon as the soil has thawed. But for Northern lawns, the fall season is better suited to lawn aeration. The ideal air temperature is around 60 degrees to perform lawn aeration.

Likewise, if your thatch problem is severe (say, 3/4" thick or more), rent a vertical mower from a rental center. If you don’t think you can do this job yourself, there’s nothing wrong with hiring a lawn service to aerate your lawn.

I hope you enjoyed our lawn garden care page.

Happy Gardening Marty Ware

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Lawn garden care with Better Homes & Gardens

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