How To Have A Healthy Lawn

Happy June everyone! Can you believe it’s June already?? I can not believe we have made it to the middle of the year already. This year has gone by really really fast for us. But let get back to the matter at hand our lawn/grass.

When we moved into our home our lawn looked really sad, OK our whole landscaping looked sad.

By the end of last summer our neighbors were all asking us how we make our lawn look so nice. One neighbor told me his goal this year is to have a lawn like ours. And because we keep sharing with our neighbors how we did it, I thought I should share with you!

Here is our lawn today:

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First it takes work and every year (if you continue with these tips) it will look better and better. The picture above was taken after following these tips for 2 years.

SIMPLE TIPS:

• Mowing your grass higher: we mow our grass at almost the highest setting on our mower. You want your lawn to be about 3-4″ long. Having longer grass helps in many ways like shades the soil, promotes grass to move to bare spots, and allows moisture to stay longer. We also do not mow the lawn in the same direction every time.
• Water longer and less often: this will help the roots grow deeper into your soil which helps during drought season. It is better to water for one hour once or twice a week than watering everyday for 20 minutes. Also water in the evening to help prevent the sun from evaporating the water.
• Remove weeds by hand: when we find weeds (aka: dandelions) we get a shovel and remove them by hand. This helps them from not spreading. Now if you have lots of dandelions to start with, you probably want to look into a chemical to remove them. Here is some info on that from Chris Loves Julia.

FERTILIZER:

Every state will have different fertilizers that will help your lawn better in your climate, check out a local lawn store or lawn company to get this information.

In Utah, we use the IFA 4-step fertilizer program, there is a new fertilizer that we have not used yet, the Bountiful Earth Humate, but we plan on using it this fall.

source

Fertilizer cost us about $40-$50 per bag (about $200 a year), some bags we only use half so it last into the next year. We use the Scotts edge spreader. We feel this is cheaper than having a company come fertilize our lawn, plus we like to do it ourselves because its easy.

**We are not sponsored by IFA, we just like their fertilizer program.**

OTHER TIPS:

• Another things we do is have our lawn aerated once a year. It cost us about $45.
• We also have our lawn thatched every other year (every 2 years) this removes all the dead grass. It cost us about $45.
• Another thing we do every fall is re-seed our lawn, we are still trying to fill in some areas of our lawn with better grass. Once that is accomplished we will only re-seed every couple of years.

I hope this helps you have a healthier lawn. Do you have any other tips to grow a healthier lawn? Or have a greener lawn?