Lawn Care

As I drive around New York and New England, I take notice of the trees and shrubs that are coming into and going out of flower – the cherries are spectacular on Cape Cod right now and one of my favorites, the Eastern Redbud, is putting on a show around Albany.

Grasses flower as well, although no one would argue with you if you were to say that they are less than spectacular, but the process of flowering does make itself obvious in ways that are not always pleasing to the eye.

When you dream about your lawn at night, is this what you see? Acres of immaculately coiffured lawns, nary a weed in sight? Ahhh… Makes you want to string a hammock between a couple of those trees and take a Saturday afternoon nap, doesn’t it?

There is a term to describe when soils have achieved the limit of how much water they can hold: field capacity.

Having a soil constantly at field capacity, especially when we are talking about lawns, is not necessarily a good thing. Whatever space in the soil that is occupied by water cannot be also occupied by air, also an important component of a healthy soil.

Lawn rolling questions normally have their source in a homeowner that drives his mower over his lawn and notices how bumpy the ride is. A logical solution would be to roll the lawn to smooth it out, but that flies in the face of why the lawn is bumpy in the first place.

A Lawn Dawg customer e-mailed the following question to us recently regarding our Tick, Flea and Ant (TFA) control services:

"How does the TFA work exactly? If a deer drops a tick in the yard after the treatment what happens? And what is the toxicity of the TFA? I have pets and children."

An unfortunate aspect of being in the lawn care industry is that we are constantly the target of regulation. I am not sure why that is but for the nearly thirty years that I have been in the business it has been a constant struggle to minimize the scope of regulation imposed upon us and to find ways to abide by the legislation that comes into law by finding materials and methods that keep us compliant as well as productive.

I wanted to aerate!

The rule of thumb is that aeration should be done during times of the year when both root development can be expected and favorable weather conditions for recovery can be anticipated. Early spring fits these conditions; indeed, if you golf you know that during the spring that dastardly superintendent ruins those beautiful greens with his aeration and topdressing!

Why so early?

It’s the dead of winter on the cusp of a blizzard of historic proportions so what better lawn care topic to discuss than that of Snow Mold?

Sometimes the most important lawn care services that Lawn Dawg performs have nothing to do with keeping the grass healthy, rather they are aimed at keeping you healthy.

Since many of us live in suburbia, areas that were cut out of and are still surrounded by woodlands, those critters that inhabit the woods come onto our lawns and sometimes right into our homes. Further, some of these critters are carriers of diseases that affect not only you but also your pets.