It may feel like your lawn and garden don’t have much life in them during the winter, but if you’re adequately prepared for spring, you’ll see a whole lot of new growth from the plants you love. Not sure how to prepare your lawn when the weather starts warming up? We’ve got you covered. Below are a few simple tips to help you prepare your lawn before Spring arrives.
How to Get Your Lawn Ready for Spring
Tidy It Up
After a cold winter, your lawn is probably littered with twigs, dead leaves, pinecones, and more organic debris. Before heading in with a lawnmower, take the time to remove all of it from the grass. This debris could damage the mower, and leaving it there will prevent wanted grass from absorbing fertilizer.
Fertilize Grass and Kill Weeds
As winter winds down, it’s a good time to help your lawn along with fertilizer, weed killer, and pre-emergent. First, use a mix of fertilizer and pre-emergent to encourage your grass to grow while killing crabgrass. Then, a few weeks later, you can add weed killer to the mix and apply again.
Keep Mowing
In early spring, the grass is going to start growing very quickly. To encourage the grass to spread wider and grow thicker, mow often. As you trim the grass down, roots send more nutrients to heal the blades. The result is a full, lush lawn. Make sure to mow every three to five days during the first six weeks or so of spring.
Mulch
With your lawn free of debris and mowed back, it’s time to mulch. Carefully edge plant and flower beds and remove dead branches from bushes, shrubs, and trees. Then use high-quality mulch to fill in the beds.
Trim Trees
Freezing temperatures, strong winds, and other elements of winter weather can wreak havoc on trees and cause limbs to break or die. Before the leaves come out, it’s difficult to tell if a limb is dead or not, so you’ll probably have to check it out with a ladder or call in a tree removal specialist. Removing damaged or dead limbs will prevent further damage to your property or potential injury to you or your household.
Wait to Seed
If it feels like your lawn isn’t filling in quickly enough, try to have a bit more patience. Bare spots in your lawn will fill in if you are using fertilizer and pre-emergent, which encourage grass growth. However, they will prevent seeds from germinating, so it’s best to wait until fall. If the patches that you want to fill are too large, consider filling them in with sod.
As long as you take the time to prepare your lawn before spring, you should have a beautiful and lush yard when the seasons change. If you need some assistance, GCS Outdoors can help. With experience and expertise in all aspects of landscaping, our pros will make sure that your lawn gets to its best this spring.