What we’re noticing:
🌧 Wet! – What started as a very dry spring (driest winter ever recorded) has turned quickly into mud season. The good news is that we’re out of the drought.
🥶 Cool! – Although this “spring” seemed to start in September of ’23 😜 and we had 80* in March; we’ve been “cool” especially for how long it seems we’ve been in Spring. This means two things:
- Grass is slow to “wake up”. Lawns with deeper green varieties of Kentucky Bluegrass love hot temperatures (and water). But in our growing season so far we’ve barely touched 70 just a couple times. Not hot at all. There’s grass that still appears dormant while we wait for a few warm 80*+ days
- It’s delayed what we thought would be the start of our seeding season. It’s going to end up being a normal start vs a month early like we thought. The soil hasn’t been warm enough for seed germination. It needs those same “wake up!” 80* days.
What we’re doing:
- We’re cooking to get our Early Spring Applications done. If the weather will cooperate for just one week we’ll be all done next week. A full month prior to last year 😎.
- We’re here on the weekend gearing up equipment for our Spring Renovation season. Core Aeration, Seeding, Soil Improvement. This will all start this week.
- Before we even catch a breath from the two things above; we’ll be getting ready for our ProSquito and Landscape Bed services to immediately follow. 😵💫 May the 4th be with us.
What you can be doing:
- You gotta get mowing! Between the rain, our fertilizer and if we get some of those hot temperatures; the grass will take off! If it hasn’t already!😳
- Weekly mowing will likely not be frequent enough. You shouldn’t mow more than 1/3 of the grass blade off so if you’re mowing at 3″ you need to cut it when it’s 4.5″ tall. [if you can’t mow more frequently you can get away with it this time of year. The grass is growing so aggressively that it can grow through stress in the Spring. Just know you are stressing it and not optimizing its health and beauty].
- You can mow lower now (the same low setting you ended with last season). Just ensure you aren’t leaving thatch clumps on top that will suffocate the turf underneath. Mowing short when there’s plenty of moisture actually promotes Kentucky Bluegrass (the majority of our lawns) to grow laterally and fill in thin areas. This time of year and with the rain we’ve had; we can take advantage of this natural thickening!
- Keep an eye on the weather conditions, drought and my emails and plan to start raising mowing heights as we get into summer.
- Although our Mowing Learn and Earn focuses on mid-season mowing, it has great content about mowing in general and you get $10 to take it!
- No need to do much else…
