How To Keep Your Lawn Green During Summer

A beautiful lawn is essential for your home to look its best. When the grass is brown, none of your other landscaping features will look as good. That's why so many people spend so much money trying to keep the grass healthy and beautiful. While it is necessary to invest some money in your lawn, it's more important to spend well than to spend big. These four tips will help you deal with the most common reasons for a lawn that just isn't its greenest.

Choose the Right Seed

If anything looks worse than a brown lawn, it's a lawn that is partly brown and partly green. These patchwork patterns are a result of mixed lawn seed. Products marketed as "sun and shade mix" are often a combination of a cool-season grass like fescue and a warm-season grass like Bermuda. Those two categories have opposite growing habits. Cool-season grasses green up in the early spring, turn dormant (brown) during the summer heat, and then green up again for fall. Warm-season species don't turn green until hotter weather, and they turn brown with the first frost. Those changes will happen no matter how much watering or fertilizing you do.

The solution is to have a single type of grass in your yard. For hotter climates, choose warm-season grass. Further north, a cool-season species might stay green all summer, depending on the weather. Whatever you do, avoid a mix.

Consider Artificial Turf

There's a reason sports venues have turned to artificial grass. It stays green with zero maintenance all year long and despite weather conditions. The harsh winter climate is the main reason you see so much artificial grass in Cleveland. The initial investment is quickly recovered when there is no water bill, no fertilizer bill, no mowing expense, no weed control, no diseases, and no repair of damaged areas.

Artificial turf provides a consistency that natural grass can't much. Artificial turf can withstand years of traffic from active pets, hard-charging sports kids, and everything else a home lawn experiences, all with no maintenance cost and a never-ending green color and consistent, ideal height.

Mow at the Proper Height

How you mow a natural lawn can make or break its green color. We all love a well-manicured lawn, neatly trimmed at a compact height. This can work just fine in a fast-growing spring yard, but summer can change your situation. Short mowing will cause the grass to experience heat stress more quickly than a taller height, pushing the grass to give up and go dormant for the summer. This opens the door to weeds that further impact appearance.

The reason for this is simple. Grass generates its energy in the lower portion of the stem. As long as this power generator is in operation, the grass stays green and healthy. If your mower blades remove these lower areas, the plant will not power itself and go dormant. Mow at the height of three inches or a little less, and never remove more than half the lawn's height during mowing.

Irrigate Wisely

In many situations, the reason a lawn loses its green color is dry weather. We all know enough about plants to realize that dry grass needs water, but we don't constantly water correctly. Incorrect watering practices can do more harm than good in terms of keeping your grass green and beautiful. Grass that is overwatered develops shallow roots, making the turf dependent on your sprinkler in anything but the wettest weather. If you go out of town for a few days or simply forget to water, those roots cannot access water in the deeper soil levels. This will turn your lawn brown even as a neglected lawn next door thrives.

Use your water sparingly. Only add enough water to make up for anything less than an inch of rainfall per week. Water in the morning if possible. This allows the sun to dry the blades through the day, so that fungus growth is not supported.

Good lawn management requires good sense. If you can sow, mow, and water correctly, your lawn will be green. If you can't, an artificial lawn can get you that bright, beautiful look.