This winter was cold! The weather was not only treacherous for us but it caused plenty of damage to our lawns. There was a lot of rain causing the soils to be extra saturated creating an ideal growing condition for Poa Annua and thinning out our lawns. Then we had more days below freezing this winter causing our lawns to become pail and sickly. All these conditions from last fall to now also have created the ideal growing conditions for lawn diseases. Below are the three areas that need attention to get your lawn looking lush and green when the Spring comes.
Fertilizer
Now what do we do? We get ready for our next growing season! Here at Rasmussen Spray Service we are starting our late winter/early spring fertilizer application includes a mixture of products to help combat everything that old man winter could throw at our lawns. Our fertilizer mix will boost our lawns with the needed nutrients to snap them out of the winter blues. Giving the grass the food it needs to grow healthy leaves and fix the damaged leaves that were caused by the winter conditions. We take our liquid fertilizer to the next level by adding humic-acid and a soil penetrant to the mix. These together not only help the uptake of nutrients to the plant but increase the beneficial microbial activity in the soil and help to allow excess standing water in your lawn to pass through the soil.
Moss Control
The battle to have a lush healthy lawn does not stop at the fertilizer. We still have the problem of moss that has filled in the areas of our lawn the winter conditions had thinned out. The moss needs to be killed and removed so that we can plant new grass in those areas. We offer a moss control treatment that will amaze you with how fast it works and how green it will make your lawn. We use Ferrous Sulfate that is deadly to moss but acts as a fertilizer to your lawn turning your grass a rich dark green. The grass in your lawn will repopulate the areas that we have killed and you have cleared away but normally the desirable grass types do not fill in as fast as the undesirable grasses and weeds. This year we are planning to start over seeding lawns to help improve the chances that the grass you want is the grass that grows.
Crane Fly
Lastly we need to address the pests that are just getting started damaging our lawn from beneath. Crane fly is a big problem in the Willamette Valley and unless you know what you are looking for it can look like the thinning damage that was caused by the winter except it is continuing to damage your lawn. Crane fly is found in every single lawn but the problem does not exist until there are so many crane fly larva that the grass can’t outgrow the damage that is being done to them. With the changing environmental conditions we are experiencing now a days getting rid of the larva in one application is not proving to be effective. The chemical only kills the larva form of the crane fly not the egg and not all eggs hatch at the same time. We treat for crane fly when we find high enough numbers of larva to cause damage and then treat again one month later to guarantee the levels are below the damage threshold.
Call our office today to set up a free appointment to have your lawn analyzed by our turf expert.