FALL MULCH APPLICATION & LAWN MAINTENANCE

Autumn is your last opportunity to prepare your yard before winter arrives. One relatively easy and very effective solution is to give your landscape plants a helping hand is the application of a 2-3″ new layer of fresh mulch. Mulch is very effective at protecting plant roots from frost or freeze damage. It also assists plants with retaining critical moisture during the cold season. This will ensure your plants survive and their beauty is preserved for blooming next season. Davis Kee Outdoor can efficiently and professionally apply new mulch to keep your outdoor green spaces beautiful.

This is the perfect time to apply winterizer lawn fertilizer. This step is the most crucial of all of the steps in your lawn fertilizer regimen. A winterizer application ensures the health of your grass is properly supported so normal growth can occur right up until freezing occurs. This step also ensures that nutrients can be absorbed and stored by the roots to spur lush growth once spring arrives. At Davis Kee Outdoor, we can apply a premium witerizer fertilizer to ensure your lawn is lush and beautiful when spring arrives.

CULLING THE DEAD & DYING

Contrary to popular belief, autumn is not the best time for heavy pruning. Autumn is, however, the perfect time to remove any dead and dying shrubs, trees, plants and leaves from your landscape. Remove dead annuals and blooms and cut back dead and dying perennials and grasses. Lightly prune any dead or dying branches from shrubs and trees. Remove dead hydrangea blossoms, but leave the stalks as these will blossom again in the spring. At Davis Kee Outdoor, our professional leaf removal and landscape maintenance services can help you ensure that your yard is ready for winter.

WATERING TIPS FOR FALL

Proper watering is a crucial element of a healthy yard and garden. Your lawn and beds do not require as much water in the fall as they did in spring and summer. Overwatering is extremely harmful, so it is important to keep to a steady moderate watering schedule. Twenty minutes of watering twice a week in the morning hours should be sufficient in our climate. Once frost is forecast, discontinue watering as this will be when your lawn enters a dormant state. Pull weeds as necessary, and cut your lawn shorter-down to 2-3 inches of height. This ensures sufficient height to help your lawn retain moisture, but minimizes issues with lawn pests and fungal infections.

Spring is absolutely a critical season for lawn and garden care and ensuring your yard is healthy, lush and beautiful, but autumn preparations are every bit as crucial. A well executed and consistent lawn and garden care routine during the fall months will ensure that your entire landscape is healthy when spring arrives. For professional assistance with maintaining your outdoor spaces, contact Davis Kee Outdoor today.

At Davis Kee Outdoor, we are well aware that summer lawn care in our service area is rife with potential frustrations. We don’t have any control over what Mother Nature throws at us, but we can provide some useful tips to help ensure that your lawn is as successful as it possibly can be. The fact is that even the healthiest and best cared for lawns are going to struggle during the extreme heat. There are some steps you can take to keep your lawn in the best possible shape this summer.

Fight Summer Lawn Care Stressors

Summer lawn care is a complec problem in this area because you are confronted with a number of potential stressors. The immediately obvious one is the weather.

In summer, your lawn is forced to endure brutal heat and long periods without significant rainfall. A quick test to check if your lawn is browning due to drought stress is to look at the way your grass blades “bounce back” when you walk on them. If you are seeing footprints throughout your lawn, or much more noticeable mower tracks after mowing, your lawn is most likely experiencing drought stress. Having said that, disease and insects are also a potential threat to a lush summer lawn.

Summertime is when fungal lawn diseases can thrive. This includes Brown Patch, Dollar Spot, and Fairy Ring. Any of these can be responsible for your lawn being brown or discolored. Also, pests such as grubs, or surface feeder lawn insects can also cause a serious threat to your lawn health.

A much larger issue can emerge when these issues combine. A lawn under stress from heat and drought is much more succeptible to disease, and the combination of the two can propel your lawn issues from bad to much worse in a very short increment of time. Your best defense is to keep your lawn as healthy as you can. Our experience is that the healthiest lawns we encounter are maintained with a combination of professional lawn care and the proper cultural practices. This combination is the key to keeping grass greener in summer. Let’s look at some specific examples.

Keeping Your Grass Greener in Summer

When summer lawn care is the goal in the greater Chattanooga area, there are a few important considerations that must be kept in mind. Let’s examine them.

Correct Watering

If you want green grass in summer, it isn’t a secret that adequate watering is at the top of the list of concerns. If you are trying to keep your lawn free of summer lawn problems related to drought, you surely want to make sure you are watering your lawn properly and effectively. This is one of those items many people consider an obvious one, but there are lots of ways to make mistakes with watering involving the quantity of water used at each watering, the duration of the watering, and the frequency of watering. A typical lawn in our area requires 1-2 inches of water per week.

The goal should always be a “soaking” style of watering, as opposed to an occasional “top” watering here or there. The goal is soaking your lawn deeply until the soil is moist down a few inches. Depending on your lawn and the type of watering apparatus used, this could mean running sprinklers for an hour or so during each watering to ensure adequate soaking.

We also have noticed that most of us give Mother Nature far to much credit for the amount of rainfall received. A heavy downpour after a rain deficit dows not automatically mean you can wait until next week to water again. A rain gauge is a very helpful tool to take the guesswork out of your watering, and lets you know more precisely how much water is making it into your lawn.

Lawn Fertilizer

After watering, a proper year round regimen of fertilization plays a significant role in how well your lawn stays green and healthy. Fertilizers provide your lawn with the Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassion (N,P,K) which are the primary nutrients your lawn needs to be successful. Timing is everything with fertilizing regimens. Once the heat of summer arrives it is not recommended to fertilize as this can aggravate turflawn disease and actually cause harm to your lawn.

Mowing

It isn’t commonly known, but mowing puts added stress on your lawn in the summertime. Generally speaking, evey time you mow, the cuts place stress on your grass. If your lawn is also drought stressed, it will be harder for your lawn to recover from each mowing.

The key to this is to mow correctly. Mowing height is one very important consideration. In general, it is healthier to keep your grass length a little taller. The height that is best for your lawn will largely depend on the primary type of grass that makes up your lawn.

Here are some common recommendations for our area:

• Tall Fescue: 3 to 3.5 inches
• Perennial Ryegrass: 2 to 2.5 inches
• Zoysia: 2 to 3 inches
• Bermudagrass: 1 to 2 inches

We also recommend mowing more often so that less of the grass is cut during each mowing. A weekly schedule has been our recommendation because that allows each mowing to remove 1/3 of the grass blade or less. Removing more than 1/3 of the grass blades on each mowing causes significantly more stress on your grass.

Dormant Lawns

Grasses typically have dormancy as a natural protection mechanis, to help the grass withstand changes in weather. Temperature and weather can greatly impact the appearance of your lawn. Cool season grasses such as Fescues and Rye will go brown and dormant during prolonged extreme heat, just as warm season grasses such as Bermuda or Zoysia will go brown dormant during the cold winter months. These grasses are still alive and will become green once favorable weather returns.

To summarize, the type of grass has a lot to do with the color of your lawn at certain times of the year. If you want a lawn that remains green through all seasons, you can plant a mixture of warm season and cool season grasses.

A Lawn Care Company For All Seasons

When the subject is quality lawn care, every season has a different set of required maintenance and challenges. Regardless of the season, you want to know that your lawn is getting the best possible care and maintenance to be the best it can be. One very significant factor is partnering with a lawn care company that will partner with you to achieve the results you desire. When you partner with Davis Kee Outdoor you have a partner that is always here to answer your questions.

1. Make sure your plants are getting enough water, especially newly installed landscaping. You’ll want to keep the soil moist, but resist the urge to overwater your plants.
2. A basic guideline to follow: Yellow leaves means you are giving plants too much water and brown leaves mean not enough water.
3. Either water early in the morning or in the early afternoon. The best time is in the morning as plants make best use of water at this time and this helps prevent rot and fungus.
4. It’s been a hot summer, so you’ll want to take care of your lawn. Only feed your lawn with slow-acting fertilizers and be sure to mow your lawn and trim the edges regularly.
5. Do not mow your lawn too short!  This is a common mistake that is unnecessarily hard on your lawn, and actually promotes the growth of noxious weeds.
6. To prevent a heat stressed lawn, cut your fescue grasses at 3 – 3 ½” or higher.
7. If you notice any yellow patches or areas of your lawn that aren’t growing well, make sure you increase the water distribution. Look for areas that are getting overwatered and underwatered and take steps to correct this imbalance.
8. During the summer heat, continue to weed your garden bed areas. You can weed by either spraying selective weed killer or pulling weeds by hand. If you’re hand weeding the best time to do it is when the soil is damp- it’ll be much easier.
9. Summer is a great time to do light pruning and clean up and improve the health and look of your landscaping. Remove any dry leaves from your perennials and annuals and any faded blooms.
10. Add or replace mulch around trees, shrubs & in bed areas to a depth of 3” to 4″ This helps maintain moisture during dry weather.
11. Make sure you’re monitoring your plants for insects and disease damage. If you notice any, treat the area as needed. There has been a large increase in insect pests due to mild winters. Spray as needed!
12. Wait to plant your fall perennials until the outside temperatures begin to drop over night. This typically will be some time in September.