Yard Maintenance and Natural Lawn Care

Yard maintenance is certainly a hot topic during those summer months. You have many options at your disposal when hiring a lawn care service provider. They can do something as simple as weekly grass cuttings, to more involved services such as fertilization, rolling, and aeration, to specialist functions like pH balancing for your lawn, weed control application and even nematode applications to control European Chafer beetles and white grubs. To put it simply, if you need hometurf lawn care, there is a company that can provide that service for you. Natural lawn care is offered by the most advanced of these, they will use organic options that are great for your lawn, and even better for the environment.

To look at each piece of your yard maintenance plan we'll first look at grass cutting. The most basic of the whole thing is a weekly grass cutting. The most natural of ways is to do this with a reel cylinder mower. Understandably it may not be the best option for your large lawn, but it should be considered for smaller ones. It is entirely people powered, quiet, and requires no gas. Using a string trimmer can get those edges looking sharp all along your walls, and give you a transition between grasses and cement sidewalks and driveways if you use it to create a line of dirt all along the border between these areas. Trust me, it looks sharp.

Organic weed control, according to my grandmother, has been around for centuries: 'get down on your hands and knees and start pulling those weeds out!' she'd say. While this is still true, organic weed control now focuses on a spray option that is not harmful to the environment due to runoff into sewers and the water table. Frequency wise you need to apply this twice a year: once in the spring to knock them down before they even begin to grow, and one later in the summer to keep them at bay.

I always remember my father putting the big rolling cylinder on the back of our lawn tractor to 'squish worms' in the spring. For a while I thought he was serious, my Dad was a funny guy like that, but I later learned that he was trying to keep the lawn level for me, my brothers, and my cousins to play baseball on it. You may not be using your lawn for sport, but if you have parties believe me when I say it can still be useful to have a nice level lawn that makes it possible for your guests to move around and not drop their hamburgers when they stumble over a high spot. Get out and squish some worms in the late spring to avoid this.

An aeration of your lawn in either the spring or fall is a great way to keep your lawn healthy. It may look kind of awkward having all these small brown lumps all over your lawn at first, but it is worth it in the long run. Either time works; I most commonly see this yard maintenance technique being done in the spring.