By DoMyOwn staff
See how you can save time and money by preventing lawn disease before it starts. In this video, we walk you through the best way to make sure you never have disease in your lawn.
One of the number one questions we get asked is, "When do I apply my fungicide?"
I'm Amber and today we're going to talk to you on how to prevent those diseases, give you a healthy lawn all year long, and hopefully save you time and money in the process.
What you want to do is no matter what's going on in your lawn or what may be causing the disease, you want to get ahead of it. Normally this is going to be in the Spring. You want to put a preventative fungicide down and make sure you're getting ahead of it so you don't have to worry about spending time treating the lawn and doing damage control later on.
Some diseases, however, will start forming in the fall, so spring and fall applications may be needed for the particular disease that you have.
While this will vary from region to region across the country, there are a few factors you can keep in mind to narrow down this window for you. The temperature as it increases is going to allow for excess moisture to collect in the air. This is going to create higher humidity levels and combined they are going to create a prime environment for disease to thrive. When your air temperatures and humidity levels make a combined of one hundred and sixty degrees, this is going to be the planet-aligning moment for all the disease to thrive in your lawn.
Make sure you are paying attention to soil and air temperatures as we ease into Spring, and make sure you are getting your preventative fungicides down in plenty of time. Now, let's dive into how to treat your yard. When applying fungicides, you want to do it fast and you want to rotate your chemistry. Rotating between active ingredients, much like with herbicides, can play a big portion in control that you are looking for.
Certain diseases, just like colds or anything else, can build up resistance or immunities to anything you may use against it. Rotating your active ingredients every other treatment or every two to three treatments will make sure that you don't have that happen and you have a beautiful lawn all year long.
While we are talking about rotations of fungicides, let's address one thing that you will see on a lot of your fungicide labels. This is going to be a number that corresponds to the group or classifications to the mode of action that ingredient can provide to the disease that is in your lawn. The FRAC code, or Fungicide Resistance Action Committee, is what is created to make sure you are doing your proper rotation and not having any disease resistance issues in your lawn.
For instance, if you start off with a Group 3 Fungicide and you do two applications with it, you may want to rotate on say your third treatment with a Group 1 or Group 11, depending on what the disease calls for and the product label at hand.
Another question we get asked a lot is when do I water my lawn or can I still water my lawn after these applications? You certainly can, you just have to be smart about it. You don't want to water your lawns at night. Keeping your lawn wet overnight is prime to let fungus and disease breed and thrive and you could wake up the next morning with much more damage than you had the night before.
Best watering practices are going to be early in the morning. This is not only going to give your turf a chance to absorb that moisture and prepare for the day stresses like heat and any other factors but it's also going to give your lawn time to dry out so that the disease spores don't have excess moisture to allow them to continue to thrive. Throughout the growing season, make sure you are only watering every couple of days. Daily watering is not going to be needed unless you may be doing a re-seed application at the same time, in which case you would want to talk to us to let us know any lawn renovations you may be doing so we can accommodate and make a lawn care schedule specific to your specific needs.
Now if you are one of the lucky ones, or maybe not so lucky, you already know what disease you have because it popped up in your lawn last year. Just give us a call or shoot our team and email and we'd be more than happy to make a recommendation for this year's treatments and make sure that it's not going to compete or cause any issues with the product you used last year. We always want to make sure you rotating properly and giving you the best chance of success in your lawn.
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