Help wake up your lawn with spring lawn care tips

The most important part of spring lawn care is to make sure that the lawn has plenty of
opportunity to gently come back to life during the early spring months. If you do it right, the sun and soil will do most of the work for you.

Sometimes you don’t have any control over how the lawn was treated the previous fall, in which case your best bet is to treat the lawn as if it received no winter preparation at all.

Don’t start too early

It can be tempting to get out the lawn tools and attack your yard just as soon as it is warm enough to go outside without a coat on. Be patient, though, and let your lawn wake itself up gradually. If you spend too much time on your lawn before it is fully green, you run the risk of compacting the grass or killing new shoots before they have a chance to mature. Wait until your lawn has turned mostly green before you begin mowing or aerating in the spring.

Begin with raking

Raking your lawn is probably how you finished working in the yard late last fall. In the spring it is a good idea to begin everything with that same rake. Give your yard a thorough, deep raking before you begin to mow or treat the grass.

This allows you to pull up any thatch that may have accumulated over the winter when the grass was less springy. It also gives you a chance to find any dead spots or compacted areas that need special attention. When a lawn becomes compacted, you need to use an aerator to loosen the soil and allow the grass to grow more easily once more.

Dealing with weeds

Early spring can be a good time to apply herbicides to prevent the weeds from developing. It is much easier to get rid of persistent weeds before they have a chance to form than to deal with them once they have fully matured.

If you treat your lawn for weeds in the late fall, you will probably not have as many to deal with in the spring. A light application of pre-emergent weed killer in the spring should take care of any of the weeds that survived your fall treatment. Don’t overdo the spring weed killer, however, or you may damage the new grass that is starting to grow.