Lawn Maintenance is Hands-Down The Heart of Your Landscape

Usually, when we tell people we do landscaping, they assume we mow lawns. And, well, we do. We also mulch, design, and install new landscape pieces, maintain shrubs, do seasonal cleanups, and aerate and overseed.

Landscaping covers a lot of ground. But it makes sense that the lawn is the first item that springs to mind when people hear “landscaping” since, with its size and time spent on it, lawn maintenance is at the heart of landscaping.

So with summer ending and pumpkin spice signaling the arrival of fall, we think it’s time that EKG took the pulse on your lawn.

Lawn Mowing

Lawn maintenance is not the same as lawn mowing, but mowing is a large part of maintenance. With the weather changing, it’s also time to consider changing the length of your grass.

You can trim your grass slightly in autumn than in the summer. But that doesn’t mean you can cut it too short!

With the weather sometimes still unpredictably warm here in Virginia, the beginning of fall is not much different than summer. However, when late fall comes along, 2.5 to 3 inches is a good length for cool season grasses, while 1.5 to 2 inches is perfect for most warm season grasses.

The Final Cut

Before winter comes, we will need to do your last cut. This is especially important for your lawn, even though the grass will be dormant over the winter. If you cut it too short, you leave it unprotected from frost, which can freeze and kill the roots.

Conversely, when you leave grass too long, it can collapse under its weight, smothering the grass around and trapping moisture between it and the ground. The trapped water can then either freeze or grow mold.

Seasonal Cleanup

As seasons change, preparing your landscape for those changes is essential. In no season is this more true than in the fall.

Leaves & Debris

Fall is the aptly named season of leaves on the ground. Our foliage is so beautiful that leaf-peeping tourists travel from other states to see it! The problem is, it doesn’t stay that way.

As the leaves fall, they have to go somewhere, and since the lawn likely makes up the lion’s share of your property, most of them will fall on your lawn. So what to do about all those leaves?

Collecting leaves and other plant debris as part of your lawn maintenance is crucial. This is the bulk of our seasonal cleanup. If you leave the dead plant remains on the lawn, too, it will prevent water and nutrients from reaching the plants.

Worse, leaves and other plant debris can trap moisture between it and the ground in much the same way that overly long grass can, with the same results: mold and lawn disease.

Edging and Mulching

Your gardens affect your lawn, so part of our lawn maintenance is keeping the edge well-defined between your garden beds and grass. That means creating and maintaining an edge and replacing mulch that has decomposed.

Lawn Maintenance to the Max: Aeration & Overseeding

Loyal EKG readers already know about aeration and overseeding. We’ve discussed it several times because it’s crucial to your lawn. But, here’s a refresher just in case not everyone reading is a professional landscaper.

Aeration

Aeration adds air and space to your lawn. Over time, especially during the summer, your soil gets dense. Compacted soil is caused by people walking on it, water, and erosion.

Erosion and compacted soil, unfortunately, tend to exacerbate one another, and neither is suitable for your lawn. Dense soil leaves no room for grass to grow or for water to reach it. So at least once a year, we aerate.

Soil aeration involves poking holes and then pulling up the plugs of earth.

Overseeding

That dense soil can cause some unhealthy grass. You’ll never have one hundred percent of your grass make it through the summer. That’s why we overseed!

Adding seeds replaces the grass that has died, and the perfect time to overseed is in the fall directly following aeration.

The Grass Is Greener with EKG

Lawn maintenance, as you can tell, is more than mowing. Some tasks need to be performed every season, and most of those tasks take the experience to do correctly.

EKG puts our heart into your lawn. We’d love to help you with your grass and other landscaping needs.