By DoMyOwn staff
Drought, extreme heat, and high heat in the summer months can be a challenge for lawn care. Learn how to care for your lawn in extreme heat so you can have a thriving green lawn all year long.
Hey it's Heath from DoMyOwn.com! Today we're going to talk to you about caring for your lawn in the heat and drought stressed summer.
One of the best ways to determine if your lawn is getting heat stressed is to walk across the lawn. if you're seeing footprints after walking across the lawn, that's a good sign your lawn is getting heat stressed. Another way is the color. If it's looking brown or greyish in color, then you need to add water to the lawn.
Our best watering practices are going to come prior to the sun really getting up and evaporating a lot of that water that you've put on the lawn. Between 1 and 3 am in the morning prior to the dew being on the lawn. That would be the best time if you have a sprinkler system during the summer months. You're gonna wanna add an inch of water per week. That would usually be about 2 waterings at least. For sandy soils, you're gonna water more frequently but not as long. You may only need to water for 20 minutes in each zone. For clay soil that maybe you only water twice a week but you water for a longer period of time to get it to soak into a deeper level. You may need to water for 45 minutes in each zone. But what we're looking for is about a half inch of water each time you water the lawn. A good tool to use is a rain gauge. You can set that out in the middle of the lawn, turn on your sprinkler system, and see how long it takes to accrue about a half inch of water. Another good way if you don't have a rain gauge is to take a tuna fish can. Set it out in the middle of the lawn, turn your sprinkler system on and wait until you get about a half inch of water in the tuna fish can as well.
When mowing the lawn, make sure that you're not removing more than a third of the grass blade anytime that you mow it. In times that it's drought stressed, you may wanna skip that mowing cause we don't wanna stress out the lawn without giving it more water. Once we've watered it and it's bounced back and it's green, then that would be a good time to mow. Along with mowing, if we've mowed too much of the grass off depending on the grass type, especially for cool season grasses, we could have damaged that turf to the point where it would not recover. So that's why it's important to cut off too much of the grass blade off at any given time. Other grass types like St. Augustine, Bermuda, Centipede, or something like that, would actually have a chance to recover but it may be a slow process in that recovery.
One of the questions we're getting asked is should I apply a product to the lawn. Fungicides or an insecticide or a herbicide or anything like that and the answer is no if we are talking about herbicides. We do not want to apply any more herbicides to the lawn that could damage the lawn more than it already is. We want that lawn to recover prior to putting herbicides down. Fungicides and insecticides will be safe if we apply them early in the morning and late in the evening. We don't wanna apply them during the hot part of the day because a lot of those products are oil-based products and they can actually scorch or singe the leaf of the grass during the hot part of the day.
One of the questions we're getting asked is can we apply fertilizer to the lawn during the summer months. For cool season turf and warm season turf, we do wanna apply fertilizers to those grasses but we wanna make sure that the lawn is not stressed out by heat or drought. Anytime that the lawn is stressed we do not wanna apply a fertilizer to encourage more growth out of it. Now for those individual fertilizers, you wanna check the product labels and make sure that there's not any heat restrictions or anything like that when you're applying. It is best done during the early morning or the late afternoons when the heat is not as hot.
There's plenty of different products on the market that can help in your drought or heat-stricken lawn. Some of those products are water retention products or humic acid being one of those. That would aid in soil retention to keep that moisture into the soil so you don't have to water as much or as frequent.
Be sure to check the label for the product that you're using for the recommended rates and timing of that applications. This will apply to all the products across the board. So if you liked this video, please click the subscribe button and check out our other videos.
