Tag: winter

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Seasonal Lawn Care

Lawn Care Tips for August

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Nitrogen can Make or Break your Lawn

Early spring temperature fluctuations can cause sporadic turfgrass growth. Proper mowing is critical to the maintenance of a high quality lawn. If rapid turfgrass growth occurs, infrequent mowing will result in scalping of the turf. The frequency of mowing should be timed to remove no more than 1/3rd the leaf tissue. A week of 18o days and mild nights and the couch grass wakes up from winter dormancy.

Around 2 to 3 weeks after almond blossom appears is about the time that kikuyu emerges from dormancy. Assess the volume of clippings removed each cut. If it is significantly more than your previous cut then you should increase mowing frequency immediately.

Dog urine & faeces
Urine damage from dogs occurs occasionally in some home lawns. Often these spots are quite apparent in the spring. Homeowners often complain that the spots never recover and remain barren.

Dog urine and faeces can often be a frustrating problem related to lawn care. Small amounts may produce a green up or fertiliser effect while larger amounts often result in lawn burn or dead patches. While most burn spots will recover with time and regrowth, dead areas can be large enough in some cases to require reseeding or sodding. For homeowners who are also dog lovers, this can present a dilemma, particularly when one family member prefers the dog and another prefers a well-manicured lawn. An understanding of the interaction between dogs and the lawn can keep the yard (and family) at peace, not in pieces.

The fundamental problem with the presence of urine or faeces on the lawn is related to the nitrogen content and concentration of these waste products. Urine is a problem for lawns because it is applied all at once as a liquid fertiliser.

The primary concern in addressing urine damage to lawns is minimising the nitrogen concentration added to the lawn at any single time. The addition of any of dietary supplements has enough potential to cause harm, with limited to no known benefit for the lawn, and are not recommended. When owners have reported successes, as is sometimes the case on internet forums, liquids likely improved the situation because the urine concentration after treatment was diluted.

The most consistent solution to dog spots on lawns is to provide multiple fresh water drinking points around the garden to encourage the dog to drink more often. Watering the spot after urinations will accomplish the dilution with no ill affects on the dog. A fertiliser effect rather than burn was noted when the site was watered at any time up to 8 hours after urination. Routine watering of the grass in early mornings may not be sufficient to prevent all urine burns.

What fertiliser do we use?
Not all fertilisers are the same, and to steal a phrase from Castrol… Some fertilisers aren’t fertilisers. Ask us about it!

Pests and diseases
As the temperature rises above 16 degrees aphids become active, feeding on new plant growth. The most effective control is weed control – aphids breed on many species of thistle and other preferred weeds, then transfer to the young shoots of ornamentals. If spraying is considered necessary, a systemic insecticide that enters the plant sap stream is most suitable.

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Seasonal Lawn Care

Lawn Care Tips for July

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Healthy Lawn is the Best Weed Defence

Lawns: Now that the soil is as saturated as it probably will be this winter, apply gypsum to improve the texture of most soils. Gypsum has the action of causing clay particles to aggregate and form bigger lumps, increasing void space in the soil and improving drainage. Gypsum will assist to overcome the tendency of many garden ‘loams’ to water-log readily and become hard setting when dry.

Kikuyu lawns will green up with a very light application of water soluble nitrogen – 1 to 2 grams of nitrogen per square metre, plus an equal amount of Potassium is plenty at this time of the year. Couch is fully dormant so there is little point in fertilising it now as it is unable to absorb the nutrient. Respect the fact that it needs a period of dormancy.

Lawn Weeds Are Often Signals: If weeds are growing in your lawn, this may indicate a problem. In order to grow and compete with weeds, lawns require light, water, nutrients, air and proper temperature. If even one of these basic needs is missing, the quality of your lawn may rapidly decline and weeds may prevail.

Each weed in your lawn produces many viable seeds. You help weeds out with close mowing. Extended drought and high or low temperature extremes injure lawns, too.

The best defense against troublesome weeds is a healthy, dense and actively growing lawn. You create this type of lawn by mowing often at the right height, fertilising and liming according to soil test results and core aerating to reduce soil compaction. You can increase the amount of light reaching your lawn under tall, isolated trees by pruning limbs below 3 metres. Air movement across the surface of your lawn may improve by thinning, transplanting or eliminating selected shrubs growing nearby.

Increasing attention is being paid to autumn fertilising of warm season turfgrasses. The aim is not to extend grass growth further into winter, but to provide adequate nutrition that will enable the turfgrass to emerge from dormancy with a vigorous spring green-up that retains root dominance. We want new feeder roots even more than we want lush shoots. Old ideas of bringing grasses out of dormancy with massive doses of nitrogen in spring are being superceded by judicious applications of potassium nitrate in autumn.

In a domestic lawn, hybrid couch grasses are especially prone to thatching when mown at the customary two week schedule. The hybrid couches were really designed for high maintenance golf greens where daily mowing is considered normal. Thatch development is a natural consequence of grass growth. In nature it is an ecological adaptation that allows for nutrient recycling and the retention of moisture in the root zone.

If your lawn feels spongy to walk on, or if mowing leaves yellow “scalped” patches, AAA can provide affordable dethatching, also known as scarifying.

Categories
Seasonal Lawn Care

Lawn Care Tips for June

BEATING the Winter Chill

Winter is officially here! As June brings frosty mornings and colder days to Adelaide and the Southern Suburbs, your lawn faces a completely new set of challenges. Whether you have a warm-season grass going to sleep or a cool-season turf braving the chill, how you care for your lawn this month determines how well it bounces back in Spring.

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Here are our top tips for helping your lawn survive and thrive through a South Australian winter:

1. Adjust Your Mower Height (Know Your Grass Type!)

Your mowing strategy needs to completely change in June, and it all depends on what type of grass is growing in your backyard.

For Warm-Season Grasses (Couch, Kikuyu, Buffalo): These varieties are heading into dormancy as soil temperatures drop. Growth slows dramatically, so you won’t need to mow as often.

The AAA Tip: Raise your mower blades! Leaving the grass a bit longer increases the leaf area, allowing it to capture more of the limited winter sunlight to produce energy.

For Cool-Season Turfs (Fescue): These lawns are actually in active growth right now!

The AAA Tip: Keep mowing them to a height of about 4 to 5cm until shoot growth completely stops. Letting cool-season grass get too long and “matted” over winter creates a damp, shaded environment where fungal diseases love to spread.
2. Hold the Fertiliser (Usually!)

It’s tempting to throw down some fertiliser to perk up a dull winter lawn, but for dormant warm-season grasses like Kikuyu and Couch, it’s a waste of time and money. As the sap flow has practically stopped, the grass simply can’t absorb the nutrients.

The AAA Solution: Fescue lawns are the exception! They respond beautifully to frequent, light applications of Potassium nitrate in June. But be careful – Fescue is highly intolerant to phosphorus (the “P” on the fertiliser bag). If you’re unsure what your lawn needs, let our experts assess your turf and feed it the exact, safe blend it requires.
3. Melt Away the Morning Frost
Those crisp, icy Adelaide mornings might look beautiful, but heavy frost can “burn” the grass leaf and cause your lawn to lose its green colour much faster.
The AAA Tip: Try setting your sprinklers to run for just one or two minutes first thing in the frosty morning. The tap water is actually warmer than the frost, which helps melt the ice quickly and maintains a slightly higher soil temperature.
4. Evict Turf from Your Garden Beds
Sometimes, the most annoying weed in your garden is actually your own lawn! Grasses love to creep into garden beds over the year, flourishing around young trees and stealing their energy. While standard weed killers like glyphosate work wonders in summer, they become incredibly slow and less effective during the cold winter months when weedy plants are near dormancy.
The AAA Solution: Don’t waste a freezing weekend fighting a losing battle against creeping grass. We use specialised, commercial-grade chemical blends designed specifically for cold-weather weed control. We can efficiently eradicate invasive turf from your garden beds without harming your surrounding plants.

Need help managing your winter lawn?

Winter lawn care is all about precise timing, correct identification and knowing exactly what your specific turf needs. If you’d rather stay warm inside while the professionals handle the frosty mornings, the team at AAA Lawn Services is ready to help.

From Rose Park and Marion all the way down the coastline to Sellicks Beach, we provide expert mowing, targeted weed control and custom winter care programs.