Lawn

With the end of summer and fall fast approaching, particular care must be taken for your lawn. Some summer effects on the lawn need to be taken seriously such as dry spells and pests. These effects can have long lasting damages on your lawn and increase the recovery time, thus delaying its spring rebirth. By taking action now, you can maintain the liveliness of your lawn come spring time.

Common Fall Diseases

Some problems your lawn may encounter at this time of year include two lawn diseases, gray leaf spot, and brown patch.

Gray leaf spot, a foliar disease, is caused by a fungal pathogen that that infects and destroys leaf blades, usually St. Augustine grass. Leaf infections can move readily into the crown area, killing individual plants. The disease causes small brown-gray colored leaf spots with brown to purple borders on leaf blades, which can turn into a longer form or diamond-shaped. In warm, wet weather, spots can even be covered with gray mold. Sometimes a yellow circle or general chlorosis can appear around spots.

Though fall is upon us, the hot and humid Texas summers prolong the summer disease and encourage gray leaf spot to grow. If you notice gray leaf spots in your lawn, avoid excessive nitrogen fertilization and make sure you water in the early morning so the lawn surface will not stay wet overnight.

Brown patch, considered one of the most common lawn diseases, start off in small spots and can quickly spread outwards in a circular shape - a ring of brown grass with a patch of green grass in the center. The crown of the individual grass blade stays green while the rest of the blade turns brown. You might also be able to see a white fungal web at the edge pf the dead grass patch on hot, damp mornings. Brown patch is mostly found in Bermuda, Kentucky Bluegrass, Centipede, Bent, St, Augustine, and rye grasses in warm areas with a high level of moisture and/or shade.

To fight brown patch, you must keep your grass healthy and only fertilize your grass when it needs it and to keep from watering in the evening. More ways to water your lawn appropriately are discussed below.

Helpful Hint: If you have a question about the best treatment for your disease problem, contact your county extension office of the Texas A&M Agricultural Cooperative Program. It's free and they can tell you the pros and cons of all your choices. You can find contact information here: http://county-tx.tamu.edu/

Fall Lawn Maintenance

While caring for your lawn and making sure it is disease-free, you should also focus on ways to maintain its health. The three main things to focus on this time of year should be watering, aeration, and composting.

Watering
Even though the summer months called for frequent bouts of watering, lawns sill need watering this time of year, just not as often as during the hot summer days. It is a good idea to keep your lawn moist. A rule of thumb to follow for watering your lawn during this season is making sure your lawns have enough water to penetrate the soil four to six inches - this will help maintain a healthy root system.

Lawn experts point out the importance of the time of day to water your lawn. Watering should be done by mid-morning. Experts say that watering later in the day can produce undesired results such as brown patch and the possibility of take-all root rot diseases since the grass stays wet all night.

Also, keep in mind that the type of grass determines how frequently you should water it. Warm weather grasses, which go through a hardening-off, dormant process during the fall, require very little watering, if at all. On the other hand, cool weather grasses require a watering about every week. New grass should be watered three to four times a week until the grass seed sprouts.

Aeration
Just like you need oxygen to breath, so does your lawn. Aeration is the process of making holes in the ground throughout your lawn, usually using a lawn/core aerator. Homeowners should aerate their lawns to keep them healthy by reducing soil buildup to allow water and fertilizer to penetrate the root zone and helping to control lawn thatch, which makes it difficult for lawns to breathe.

To achieve the most for your lawn, it is recommended that actual cores or plugs of soil be pulled from the lawn. Holes should be two to three inches deep and no more than two to four inches apart. Also, lawns should be thoroughly watered the day before aerating so plugs can be pulled more deeply and easily.

Composting
Fall is the best time to compost your lawn. Spreading compost over your lawn in the fall is essentially building up food reserves. Just as an army of ants work all year to gather up food that will last them throughout the winter, composting your lawn now will enable it to get through the winter and be ready and healthy for the spring.

Compost -- composed of almost any organic material -- encourages soil fertility and stimulates healthy root development in plants. Composting involves blowing the compost onto the yard with a blower truck to get an even distribution of material on the lawn. Make sure that the compost is swept off the grass blades and down into the turf. Watering your lawn afterwards is recommended, as you want to activate the compost microbes and wash them onto your soil.

Compost contains many advantages, such as helping grass plants to be more drought resistant and insect and disease resistant. Lawns treated with compost do not have to be fertilized and watered so frequently since the compost loosens clay soils and helps sandy soils retain water better. Also, instead of searching for a bag of fertilizer that will give you the correct amounts of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous, organic compost naturally produces these nutrients naturally by the feeding of microorganisms.

Spreading compost over your lawn is the organic and environmentally friendly alternative to chemical fertilizers, which can be harmful to not only your lawn, but to the environment as well.

Fall is the best time to start
Remember that lawn care is continuous, even though the fall weather may trick you into thinking nothing else needs to be done for the whole season. In keeping watering, aeration and composting as your rules of (green!)thumb for your fall lawn care, you can expect to have a beautiful, well-maintained yard right around spring time.

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