The worst of the summer heat will have subsided soon. Refreshed by the thought of breathing cooler air, you're poised to roll up your sleeves and do some fall lawn maintenance -- in between carving pumpkins, of course! But you should read these fall lawn care tips first. The regimen right for your fall lawn care will vary, according to whether your lawn is composed of a warm season turf grass or a cool season turf grass. If you are unsure which type comprises your lawn, take a sample to your local county extension.
Fall Lawn Care Tip: Find Out Your Grass Type
Common cool season turf grasses include:
- bentgrasses
- bluegrasses
- fescues
- ryegrasses
Among the common warm season turf grasses are:
- bermudagrass
- buffalograss
- zoysiagrass
To be sure, there will be some fall lawn maintenance you'll have to do regardless of the type of grass on your lawn. Let's look at these tasks first:
- Apply herbicides to broadleaf weeds
- Correct soil pH. If a soil test should show a need to reduce acidity, apply lime now. If alkalinity needs to be reduced, apply sulphur.
- Thatch removal: dethatch your lawn, by raking; for bad cases of soil compaction, you may have to employ the technique known as core aeration, for which lawn equipment known as "aerators" can be bought or rented
- Rake leaves, or use a leaf vacuum, lest the leaves smother your grass over the winter
- Lawn equipment care: make sure to drain old gas out of lawn mowers after last mowing
The nature of the following fall lawn care chores depends on whether it's a cool season or warm season turf grass that you have to care for:
- Watering
- Fertilization
- Setting lawn mower height
Fall lawn care for cool season grasses entails ensuring that lawns receive enough fall water to carry them through the long winter. Don't think that because the temperatures outside are no longer high, you can forget about watering in the autumn. Another fall lawn care tip that applies specifically to the maintenance of cool season grasses is fertilization. Apply 1 pound of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet of lawn. Avoid fertilizing a warm season turf grass in the autumn. The latter undergoes a hardening process during this time of year to prepare it for winter. Fertilizing warm season grasses in the fall may interfere with that hardening process.
Adjusting lawn mower height for fall mowing is not an issue with cool season grasses. Just set the height as you normally would, right up until the time when growth stops and you stop mowing. But an adjustment should be made to lawn mower height in the fall for warm season turf grasses: increase the height by 1/2 inch.
Lawn Care Tip Concerning Lawn Mowing:
So at exactly what height should you set lawn mowers? According to Robert E. Kozlowski at the Cornell University Cooperative Extension, mowing your lawn with a lawn mower set at a proper height can save you from having to rake or bag your lawn clippings. His rule of thumb is, "Mow when your grass is dry and 3 to 3-1/2 inches tall. Never cut it shorter then 2 to 2-1/2 inches or remove more than one third of the leaf surface at any one mowing."
Kozlowski's premise is that the valuable nutrients in the grass clippings can do your lawn some good, left right where they lie after mowing -- as long as their bulk is kept at a minimum. By following his rule of thumb and cutting only about an inch off the top of your grass at any one time, the bulk of the grass clippings is kept low.
Employing Kozlowski's lawn care tip will entail more frequent mowing, to be sure. But the result will be a healthier lawn, fed by nutrients that you would otherwise be hauling away. Think of it this way: with Kozlowski's approach, you're essentially mowing and fertilizing at the same time. Taking care of two lawn maintenance tasks at once -- that's for me!
Some useful lawn equipment to perform this task is the mulching lawn mower. With mulching lawn mowers, you don't need to be quite so careful about the height at which you cut your grass, since the clippings are shredded up more finely. This works much better for those of us who don't generally walk around with tape measures on our belts!
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