If you have a lawn at your home you’re pretty lucky, because you can make use of it in more ways than you think. Your lawn can say many things about you and your house based on how you present it. It can become like the warmest welcome to your neighborhood and anyone who comes to visit, or it can scream “stay away” if you don’t take good care of it. Taking care of your lawn doesn’t need to be hard work at all. The lawn is part of your home, so caring for it and polishing it is as normal as cleaning and tidying up your house. A beautiful lawn can also be an amazing contribution to making your neighborhood a healthier place to live in. Here are some of the best suggestions for a gorgeous lawn and practical ways to take good care of it.
Keep Your Lawn Green and Healthy
A green lawn can become a beautiful garden area to hang out with family and friends and throw the most fun outdoor parties. It can also be the best place to have some quiet time reading or listening to music, or even doing some work. Grass can never go wrong when it comes to elegance and beauty, besides the world needs more green areas to save the environment and improve the quality of our lives.
Although grass and plants do need some care, they’re absolutely worth it, and you can hire a gardener to look after them if you don’t have enough information about caring for plants. What you can do though, is mow your lawn to get rid of pests and weeds that can harm your plants. You can also hire a complete lawn care service to make sure your grass and plants stay healthy.
Take Great Care of Your Trees
Trees are the best for natural shades that don’t block the light. They are also beautiful and make lawns look amazing. Be careful with trees though, because you may have a dead tree and not be aware of it. Furthermore, the specialists at Dawkins Tree Care advise people to look out for dead trees or trees that may be a danger to the rest of the plants on the lawn. This is why you need to contact a professional tree care service to inspect the health of your trees and give you great suggestions about which types to plant on your lawn and which ones to avoid. Planting trees is also another way to help save the environment.
Besides taking away carbon dioxide and producing oxygen, they also absorb dust and other dangerous gases in the air. Not only that, but trees reduce the intensity of heat as well as preserve warmth on cold days. And if you get many showers of rain or storms, planting trees on your lawn will protect your house from getting severely affected by them.
Get the Most Recent Gadgets
Since technology is spreading widely in all aspects, caring for lawns is no exception. One of the most feared things about having different plants on your lawn is that some plants need special care, and even the common ones can be a little high-maintenance if you don’t know much about planting and agriculture. The savior that is technology has a solution to this issue; a smart app that tracks your plants.
The app tracks the plants you’re unsure about using Bluetooth and gives you all the information you need to know about the said plant and how to take care of it. It will also notify you if the plant is too dry and whether you need to water it yet or whether you still need to wait a bit, and also whether you’ve watered it enough or the plant still needs more.
Another way smart technology contributes to helping make taking care of lawns much easier is smart lawnmowers. It can be pretty tiring to mow the lawn the original way. It can cause discomfort in your back having to slightly bend sometimes, and the lawnmower can be pretty loud. Smart lawn mowers are great since they are very quiet, you can monitor them on your phone, control them, and set them up to suit how you like your lawn to be mowed.
Smart technology has also found solutions to watering your plants. Now you can have smart sprinklers that you can set up to water specific areas, or let it check the heat and do the watering needed. These smart sprinklers save water and your plants from excessive watering. Save the resources by using only the amount of water needed, and save your plants’ life.
Choose the Right Soil
They say healthy soil means a healthy garden. Just like the human body, plants need the nutrients and the right environment to help them grow healthy and strong. Depending on the area you live in, your weather conditions, and the plants you need, you can choose the suitable type of soil. You also need to know that there are certain things to add to the soil that will improve its health and the plants’ health.
You can ask gardeners or laboratories that have experts specialized in plants and soil to suggest what soil is best for your lawn, and what elements you may need to add to maintain the perfectly balanced soil that will provide the best nutrients to your plants.
The Right Time to Plant Seeds
Plants can’t all be planted at the same time, as each group of plants needs a certain season to be planted and grown. Deciding which grass you want to plant depends on many factors, including the climate where you live, the season they best grow in, and the effect of different temperatures on them.
Gardening and planting experts suggest that you add the seeds for the grass that grow in winter during the late summer and fall to give them enough time to grow and absorb nutrition. It also allows your seeds to grow strong roots in relaxed conditions without having to deal with difficult weather conditions and how they stress the soil, and eventually stress the roots.
Avoid Certain Common Mistakes
There are some mistakes that you need to know about so that you can avoid them when taking care of your lawn. To learn more about your soil and what you need to add to it and the types of grass to plant in it, you need to take a sample to a lab and have it tested there. You will know the type of soil you have and how to work on making it more suitable for your plants.
Another common mistake is not choosing the right grass. You need to know which grass grows better in your soil type and the climate you live in. Randomly choosing grass can lead to weak plants or a grassless lawn.
One of the most common mistakes is adding weed treatments and some fertilizers that remove weeds too early when the seeds haven’t grown yet, or too close to the seeds. These treatments may kill your seeds since they won’t recognize the weeds from the seeds.
Adding lime to the soil raises its pH levels. If your soil has enough pH, adding lime will harm the soil and the plants more than benefit them. Yes, if the pH levels are low, lime will increase them which will result in better nutrition to the plants and stronger roots, but unnecessarily adding lime will have the opposite effect. This is why you need to test your soil’s pH levels first.
Mow the Leaves Instead of Raking them
People think that leaves need to be raked to give space for plants to breathe and grow, but this is not entirely true. If the layer of leaves is too thick, then yes, this is not so good, but dead leaves can be natural nutrients to the soils and plants. If your dead leaves are too thick, mow them to break them into tiny little leaves. This way they won’t be too thick, so they won’t harm your plants. Also, we have to admit that dead leaves can actually look beautiful, so keep them rather than getting rid of them.
Consider Sod
Sod is a good option for your lawn, and here are the reasons to consider it. You don’t have to wait for the sod to grow like when you grow your own seeds; it’s already grown. Sods also have very few to no weeds, so the grass is safe. The biggest sod turn-offs are that it’s quite expensive and it requires professional experts to install it because if it’s not done right, it may end up looking uneven and the roots may not be strongly rooted into the ground.
However, when installed correctly, it looks beautiful. Sod is just as healthy as growing your own grass. It may limit your options, but if you aren’t a gardening expert, sod may be the best choice for you since it saves a lot of time and effort once installed and settled.
The Best Place for Pets
Pets are amazing to have. They make life a lot more fun, they’re so cute, and if you have kids, having pets teaches them how to become more responsible. But some pets, like dogs, love playing outside. Many people don’t have another choice but to walk their dogs in the streets. But if you have your own lawn, you are one of the luckiest ones! You know your lawn is clean and has nothing harmful for your dog.
The lawn is also a great space for your dog to run around freely and play with you. Lawns are also one of the coolest places for building dog houses. Cats will also enjoy playtime outside in the sun.
Get Rid of Harmful Pests
First, you need to check whether you have pests, and what kinds of pests you have to choose the best way to get rid of them. Here are some signs that indicate what you have.
- Armyworms: they’re mostly yellowish-green worms, but may be black or dark brown, are pests that feed on the grass. If you find brown patches on your grass, there’s a huge chance this is their work. To get rid of them, you can use organic insect killers so you don’t harm the environment or your grass.
- Moles: these little rodents leave piles of dust in your soil in the places of the tunnels they build. They ruin your soil, which is why you need to get rid of them. You can use traps or pour some castor oil on your grass and your lawn as it drives them away.
- Lawn Grubs: they are small worms that feed on grassroots in your lawn, so they are quite dangerous to grass. You probably have them if by the end of summer or the beginning of fall you find some yellow-brown grass in your lawn that is dead. To get rid of these grubs, there are natural products to buy that help you heal your destroyed grass and get rid of lawn grubs for as long as a whole year.
- Chinch Bugs: these are very small, black bugs that absorb the juices in the grass, destroying it and detaching the grass from the soil. If you find loose, dead grass, your lawn may be infected with them. Natural insecticides and special soap gets rid of them.
- Honey Bees and Yellow Jacket Hornets: they are dangerous because they sting. They may not harm your lawn, but their stings are bad. Do not harm them, but you can call experts to get rid of them for you without killing or harming them.
Having a lawn is a wonderful advantage that you should make great use of in as many ways as you can. No need to worry about taking care of it anymore with all the possible solutions we mentioned. Just enjoy a little bit of nature right outside your home.
Photo by Doug Vos on Unsplash
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