The idea of a beautiful green lawn is something that a lot of us dream about. The reality, though, tends to be a little bit different.
Lawn maintenance is difficult to handle, and it’s easy for patches of your lawn to lose their color and vibrance. Those patches tend to be pretty stubborn, too.
Fortunately, there are several ways to keep your lawn healthy and green. In the guide below, we will explore how to get greener grass, helping you overcome the homeowner’s hump of lawn management.
1. Aerate Your Lawn
The soil in your lawn might get too compact or covered to allow nutrients to enter it. Water, decaying plants, and other organic matter are all required to produce a healthy plot of soil for your grass to grow.
Aeration is the process of poking holes into your lawn at various intervals to allow all of those nutrients to enter the soil. Numerous devices make aeration easy, requiring only that you push the tool over your lawn as it pokes the requisite holes.
That said, you can take care of the process on your own with a pitchfork or spikes of some kind if you’re in a pinch.
2. Fertilize
Fertilization is a process through which you deliver nutrients to your soil so that your plants can grow. Fertilizer is just a manual way to improve upon what nature is already doing.
Look into the optimal times and intervals for you to fertilize according to your climate and the type of grass that you have. Some grasses are more delicate than others, so you must be careful with how much fertilizer you use and how often you use it.
Putting too much fertilizer down might “burn” patches of your lawn, or cause them not to grow.
You can also help to fertilize by leaving some grass clippings from the previous mow in your lawn. The tops of grass blades contain nutrients that can be redistributed into the soil and help growth. You might not want to do this if you’re a true perfectionist with the way your lawn looks, but it’s not a bad idea to sprinkle some clippings in there now and then.
3. Don’t Cut Too Low
Many of us just mow our lawns at whatever height the manufacturer of the lawnmower set the blade.
That said, there’s something to be said about being careful not to cut your blades too short. Generally speaking, only the top third of the blade should be cut.
Cutting below that point strips the grass of some of its essential nutrients. The blade will have a harder time growing if it doesn’t have the majority of its foundation still intact.
Further, longer blades of grass require more nutrients. When there’s a lack of nutrients immediately available, the root system will spread further to try and find what it needs. This is a good thing, as it establishes the grass with a solid root system that can withstand adversity.
When you cut your grass too short, the root system might not have the incentive to expand. So, while you’ll have beautiful short grass, that grass won’t be able to live as long as the grass that has better-established roots.
4. Don’t Smother Spots of Grass
Grass requires sunlight to grow. This is something we all know. The plant transforms sunlight into glucose and releases oxygen, all with the help of access to the open air.
We forget, though, that the process is interrupted when we put a trailer over a piece of grass or leave a large pile of wood on an area. If you can, try to avoid smothering patches of grass with any object for more than a few hours.
If you leave something there, that spot of grass might wind up dying in the next few weeks. It’s hard to do this when you have limited space, but your lawn will look a lot better if you’re able to leave those blades open to the sunlight and the air.
5. Hire a Professional
If you’re trying to figure out how to get a green lawn but nothing is working, it might be time to bring in the pros.
Landscapers and lawn care professionals know how to make the grass greener, but they also know how to ensure that it will stay green. They can work with your lawn and give you some professional insight into what’s going wrong, what you can do to fix it, and why it went wrong in the first place.
Plus, you’ll be left with a lawn more beautiful than you could have hoped to create on your own. If your lawn is a point of pride and it’s starting to look brown and shaggy, it’s well worth it to call an expert to do an intervention.
6. Maintain a Healthy Environment
It’s easy to see the lawn as something that should just grow, forgetting that there’s a complex system of ruts and nutrient distribution that occurs on all lawns.
We’re so used to lawns that we forget that grass is a plant and has a few key requirements for healthy growth. The urban environment and soil quality of our yards might not be the best-fitted for grass to grow. So, we have to take some extra precautions as a result.
The idea is to curate your lawn as an environment that allows grass to grow instead of just treating specific pieces of your lawn that are having a difficult time growing healthy grass.
Want to Learn More about How to Get Greener Grass?
Figuring out how to get greener grass can take a lot of time and effort. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
We’re here to help, though. Explore our site for more ideas on how to improve the quality of your grass. Contact us if you’re interested in professional lawn services that will get things back into tip-top shape.