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Hey everybody it's Heath from DoMyOwn.com. Today we're going to talk to you about prep work for your lawn so that you can get your pre-emergents down to prevent those spring and summertime weeds.

So now that you're gearing up for green up, it's not only important to select a good pre-emergent for the lawn but it's also important to do the prep work for the lawn so that you can make sure that you're getting the best benefits from your pre-emergent.

You need to make sure that you're removing all the lawn debris, lawn leaves, and grass clippings and that kind of thing prior to putting down your pre-emergent. So the important factor of removing the lawn debris is to make sure that we're getting a good early green up and in addition that our pre-emergent applications are going to take hold so that we don't have weeds popping up later in the season.

One thing to keep in mind is when you're putting your pre-emergent down you would like to put it down prior to the soil temperature reaching 55 degrees. Crabgrass goes to seed at 55 degrees, so it's best if you could do a split application to get the pre-emergent down prior to it reaching 50 degrees to stop other weeds from coming into the lawn.

Make sure that you're not getting on your lawn too early. We want to make sure that the lawn is not frozen. We want to make sure that it's thawed out at the time that you're going to put your first pre-emergent down or the time that you're going to do any cleanup for the lawn as well.

So if you have a warm season lawn that has gone dormant, it's important to remove the dead grass off the top of it. You do that by scalping the lawn. You take your mower and set it on the lowest setting possible to remove all that dead grass and that will ensure that you're getting a good even green up and a quick green up in the early spring.

Another important fact is to make sure that you have a sharpened mower blade. A lot of people will do that after the first mowing of the season. Usually if you're doing a scalping, you want to make sure that you sharpen your mower blades after you do that scalping since you may be hitting rocks or roots or something like that to dull out those mower blades. This is important so that you don't cause fungus to pop into the lawn during the summer months.

If you're doing a split application, I would recommend doing your aeration or dethatching prior to the second pre-emergent application going down. By doing that, you can make sure that you can get good control over the weeds that way when you're poking holes into the lawn or disturbing the soil you're not messing up that pre-emergent barrier that you've put down. Another good thing is to make sure that your lawn is at least 50 percent green prior to doing a dethatching or a core aeration for the warm season turf.

Late winter and early spring is a great time to do a soil analysis as well. By doing a soil analysis, you'll be able to determine what type of fertilizer you need to put onto the lawn. Thanks for watching and if you like this check out our other videos.