Lawns Hub

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In the Western U.S. it is the beginning of irrigation season. Back East, the Spring rains might persist some years, but generally this is the season when lawns begin to get just a bit stressed. It’s not yet watering time, but signs are available all around. A few drier lawns are showing a bit of brown at this time of year, usually those lawns on hillsides which don’t really keep water, or else sunny spots that catch the warm, evaporating  Sun all day.

It’s not a bad idea to be proactive with watering, for those who have it. It’s also a perfect time to feed the lawns, at the tail end of rainy Springtime. Fertilizing will make the grass power out its deep green color, retaining and absorbing the iron and nitrogen for the greenest green color. The roots will totally enjoy expanding and livening up with all that good Potassium. A well-timed fertilizing can extend a green lawn’s lushest time by a month or more, if done right.

Cutting the lawn at a bit higher mode will also extend the greenness. It not only looks lusher, but the longer and larger planes of the blades will store and catch dew in the mornings and extend any watering by percentage points.

Do these two things before entering the more serious watering regimes and you’ll be a lot better off. These tactics actually save water as well.

I’m not normally a big fan of lawn ornamentation. Or, I should say I am not very used to supplying them. It’s usually enough to design and make the lawn, lol. I have had dashing dogs – moving ornaments of Nature – so excited about a new lawn they could not keep from running on it from end to end, tongues out, tails at Light Speed. But you would need a battery the size of Texas for more than an hour of that.

No, I am thinking Retro.

Take that! I love those old globes, I swear. And make no mistake – they can add color and some fun to a lawn. Granted, they are so retro that there might be some giggles as well. Oh well, eh? Better that than doing without the smiles – that’s what I say.

Bear in mind, however, I will not post pictures of Gnomes. Ever.

Colorful items deserve their time in the Sun, too!

And how can you not love these????

They’re totally more versatile than you ever dreamed. Get the Halloween Set before the rush!

For a closer look at these wonders of Un-nature, click here for them and their pals.

Lawn Boy 10641 20-Inch 6.75-Gross-Torque Briggs & Stratton Gas-Powered Variable-Speed Lawn Mower is a lawn mower which would not be considered long for commercial purposes but which is much more than “just another mower” to yourt average home owner, no matter how large the lawn. It is powered by a great name – the 6.75 GT 675 Series Briggs & Stratton Ready Start Engine. I like the tire sizes, myself, larger and wider, they handle rough terrain extremely adequately, leaving an excellent plane of mowed grass behind. Self-propelled, it has 3 possible settings for the clippings – mulching, rear bagging or side bag. Versatile and durable, its maneuverability and its power are more than enough to make for a satisfied lawn dude or gal.

For more product information and for some user’s reviews of this lawnmower, click here.

The goal of most lawn mavens is to show a thick, lush cover of green foreground, welcoming any and all to a home where one cares greatly about his appearance. I could make a long, long list of guys and gals to whom this means something magical and serves a vital role in their well-being. Sure, some are a bit “out there” and darn near obsessive with it all. It happens!

In the end, a lush lawn is, by any criterion, gorgeous to look at and improves such things as air quality and the maintenance of dust control for a home. What we often overlook in the maintenance end of any lawn is a certain “tired” nature a lawn can acquire after a period of years. It is for this reason the entire notion of “overseeding” takes place. An informed  sprinkling of grass seed over an existing lawn is never something to overlook. It is one chore which may be the easiest of all toward maintaining a healthy lawn. It also allows the introduction of new species of seed to augment or to ameliorate existing conditions, leading to an improved stand of grass lawn. Whether we are looking for an improved substance to walk on or one which may be, say, more disease resistant, overseeding allows this function.

Typically, overseeding commences with a real low mowing of the existing lawn – at a severely low setting. Seed is then sprinkled over the entire lawn, with some manual raking with a grass rake to follow. This “bedding” of the seeds allows contact with soil and some protection from elements while the germination period transpires. It also allows a couple of weeks between mowings, which we would do without a catcher.

Naturally, watering the new seeds is required on a very regular basis, either by one’s own devices or by rain. But attention to this detail is fairly vital. In the end, what one finds is a far lusher stand of lawn than before, with an improved top, lush as when it was initially installed, if not more so. A gradual shifting from here can tale place, in terms of the grass chosen. Bear in mind many types of grass combine exceptionally well.

This Greenworks 18 Inch 4 Blade Reel Type Push Mower With Grass Catcher might elicit some laughter from the motor-head set, but the fact remains, reel-type mowers make the finest cuts and are gentler to grass blades than any mower yet developed. The reel cut leaves behind a rolled pattern as well, making a surface not only clear of the abraded blade ends caused by power mowers without the scissors action of reel type blade systems – and who are often cutting by blunt trauma. I love this old fashioned method of “getting next to a lawn”. The cuts are better and an urban lot can really gain in so many ways, from the appearance itself and the exercise involved to the gorgeous clean look.

For more product information and for user reviews, click here.

Neuton CE6 19 Inch 36Volt Duracell-Powered Cordless Battery Powered Lawnmower offers a mulching and bagging option and answers a need long-since asked for and maybe, just maybe, finally delivered on. There is no doubt this technology has been “on the way”. The ability to make smaller batteries with more capacity still languishes just a bit behind what we all want to see, yet the conversion of all electrical power to a more efficient machine finally makes this technology peer from out behind the curtain. Needless to say, the advantages of machines such as these – and I include weed eaters, blowers and edgers – which operate without the polluting effects of gas power and the mess – makes machines such as this more than desirable. The features:

A removable 36-volt battery that costs about 10 cents to fully recharge in 12 hours. Versatile 3-in-1 cutting options include a rear grass bag, side discharge chute and mulching plug. Easy to use 1-touch cutting height adjustment from 1.2-inches to 3-inches, (this is huge!). It weighs a total of only 69 pounds, making the Neuton CE6 very easy to push. This is the more expensive model, featured here. For other models, click the link provided below.

For more product information and for user reviews, click here.

Miracle Gro Lawn Fertilizers have the advantage of water-soluble application which acts far faster than normal, granular fertilizers. It is not the least bit uncommon to see results the very next day and I have found this to be especially true of the tree and plant fertilizers by Miracle Gro. Their concentrations of Nitrogen and Iron in a grass-centered fertilizer always reveal a greener lawn by far, reflecting the most common bias of all lawn working fools like us.

Easy to apply – especially with their applicator – one can water and feed at the same time which is always a satisfying enterprise. I am not ‘all that’ on the longer term effects but one sure cannot argue with the short term beauty delivered by this product. There are slower-releasing fertilizers out there which do indeed last longer as a feeding system. But this stuff is not that far behind, either. This is a legitimately great product, by any criterion.

For abundant product information and for user reviews, click here.

Lawn aeration is a sometimes controversial aspect of Spring (or sometimes Summer) . Generally, most of the argumentation deals with periodicity than anything else. Should I aerate every year? When, if not, should I be aware of the need? Let’s address what “aeration” is first -

Aeration is the process of mechanically removing small plugs of soil and thatch from the lawn to improve soil aeration. Lawn thatch is the layer of dead turfgrass between the green vegetation and the soil surface that must be removed to maintain the lawn health.

The “when” can occur almost any season, outside of the obvious cold weather seasons. The “why” is this:

Thatch is the issue here, as much as anything, although soil types, such as heavy clays, might need oxygenating by virtue of taking plugs of actual dirt from the layer below the grass and upgrading that, essentially replacing the soil over a period of time.

Thatch itself becomes worse over time as organic material gets tangled up in the grass. It can be from the lateral growth of grass itself or from clippings and remainders from mowing of any type. A thin layer of thatch is actually quite desirable because it helps insulate the grass from extreme heat and cold. The cushioning effect also helps the lawn deal with heavy traffic, thus the notion of using materials which are softer than clay.

There have been some newer methods of aerating which I am not particularly fond of myself. I subscribe to the “plug” theory, personally, whereby we take an aerating machine over the lawn to be addressed and literally remove parts of the soil underneath by inserting “plug removing tines” such as the picture above illustrates. There are newer technologies that use spikes which poke holes in the ground without removing soil. What has bothered me most about this process is the “compaction” issue in dealing with harder soils. I would prefer to remove the offending material completely for a far better result, rather than pushing soil aside in an even denser pattern.

Golf courses, for example, aerate by the “plug” method, raking up the small chunks of dirt removed, then replacing the dirt with a light loam or a sand by raking crossways and thereby refilling the holes with lighter material.

In any case, the obvious advantages are many, almost no matter what item you choose to use – there is more oxygen now available to the root; fertilizers can easier make their way to the necessary level; less penetrable soils can be lightened and even sweetened; the ravages of foot and lawnmower traffic are lessened.