Tips And Techniques, Lawn Care

5 Easy Tips To Help Your Lawn Beat the Heat

Lawn hardscape wall lakeside

Lawns play an important role in landscape design by creating a kind of “blank space” in the yard. They give your eye a place to rest in between lush plantings of trees, shrubs, and flowers. However, they work best as a blank space when they’re plush and green–a difficult thing to accomplish during periods of hot, dry weather. In this post, we’ve collected five easy-to-implement tips to help you give your lawn the best chance at staying green.

Watering

For best results, water your lawn early in the morning before the sun has risen high in the sky. This will reduce the amount of evaporation that occurs, giving your lawn a chance to take in more water. Installing a smart irrigation system can help you ensure that your lawn only gets water when it really needs it.

Lawn and lake

Mowing

If you haven’t already, raise the mowing deck on your lawn mower to 3.5-4 inches. Slightly longer grass helps to shade the soil, keeping it cooler and retaining more moisture. It also helps shade out some weeds, promotes better pest and disease resistance, and boosts healthy root growth. All of this adds up to denser stands of grass and a greener lawn!

Another mowing tip: make sure that your lawnmower blades are properly sharpened. Clean cuts heal faster than jagged tears, so maintaining sharp blades on your lawnmower helps your grass bounce back faster after mowing.

Lawn with flowers

Limit Foot Traffic

Limiting foot traffic on a dry, stressed lawn will help prevent further damage, but if your lawn is where all the neighborhood kids play an enthusiastic game of afternoon tag, this tip might be a little trickier to implement!

Lawn with driveway

Consider Drought Tolerance

Sometimes a lawn won’t stay green no matter how hard you try. This might be a case of “wrong plant, wrong place.” Did you know that different varieties of grass grow better in different kinds of conditions? There are some that are more suited to hot, dry conditions than others, so if your lawn is chronically dry, it might be time to consider reseeding with a more drought-tolerant variety. You can also consider repurposing a particularly dry area into a drought-tolerant flowerbed or meadow planting, or as a patio space for watching the kids run through the sprinkler.

Lawn lakeside

Be Patient

If you’ve done all this and your lawn is still turning yellow and crispy, it doesn’t mean all hope is lost! Many varieties of lawn grass will go dormant during difficult conditions and begin to grow again when the weather is more in their favor. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your lawn is simply wait for better weather.

Lawn and house

They say the grass is always greener on the other side–but with these quick tips, we hope you’ll be able to keep the grass greener on your side! If your lawn is in need of some extra TLC, our Irrigation and Fertilization Teams can help. Contact our team today to discuss your landscape’s challenges and learn what Team Drost can do for you!