Your lawn’s health is important year-round, but it’s never more in peril than in the hot summer months. With Nashville’s frequent droughts and high temperatures, how do you keep your grass green and lush?
How to Treat Your Lawn During a Drought
What Happens to Your Lawn During a Drought
Extremely high temperatures, like the kind we’ve been seeing in Tennessee recently, can quickly turn a healthy lawn into a dead one. A heat-stressed lawn can turn brown or patchy, leaving you with an eyesore that can last a lot longer than the latest heat wave. Grass is a living ecosystem that needs to be maintained, and when it dies, it’s hard to get it back to its former glory without more expensive and time-consuming lawn care.
When your grass starts to wilt or brown, it’s because it needs something. In the summer, what it usually needs is water. Hydration is key to keeping grass healthy and alive, but how do you address the issue when you don’t understand the cause? In Tennessee, native grasses are fairly hardy against the high heat, but with the recent hot summers we’ve been experiencing, even these species are struggling to keep up. The good news is that even if you note your lawn is yellowing or has stopped growing, it’s not too late to salvage things.
Grass can protect itself from dying by going into a sort of survival mode, using what little moisture it has to cling to life, rather than to grow. While this is great for you, it can get worse pretty quickly. It’s not advisable to start overwatering, fertilizing, or seeding a heat-stressed lawn. Instead, the best course of action is to let it recover on its own and take a hands-off approach. While it may sound counterintuitive, it’s really your best bet when the summer swelter gets intense. But obviously, you can’t just leave it to its own devices when a drought is showing no signs of slowing, so what can you do? How do you keep grass green in the summer heat?
Helping Your Grass Beat the Heat
There are two main facets of lawn care when heat is concerned: preparation and reaction. If you and your grass were caught off guard this summer by the oppressive heat, don’t stress! There are things you can do to help your lawn recover and nurse it back to health. Summer lawn care is usually when things ramp up. You’re using more water in your yard, mowing, possibly fertilizing, and treating with pesticides. These are all great ways to keep a lawn green, but if things have gotten bad already, it’s best to stop everything.
A heat-stressed lawn needs a mostly hands-off approach when the heat is at its most severe. The one thing you need to continue is watering. Your lawn needs water, but when you water and how much you apply matter, especially when it’s hot outside. Every state has drought restrictions on water usage, so make sure you’re staying compliant with those and helping to conserve water during the dry season. It is possible to overwater your lawn, and this is especially true when a lawn is already damaged by extreme heat.
An irrigation system is an excellent way to keep your lawn properly hydrated, but it’s not wise to install it during the summer. If you’re stuck with sprinklers or hoses for the season, it may be a good idea to get a sprinkler gauge and research your grass a bit. There are online resources for determining how much water a lawn in our area needs and how often it should be watered. A sprinkler gauge helps you to determine how much water your lawn is getting. If you want to get low-tech, set a few recycled cans or jars in the area you’re watering, and measure the depth there to determine if each part is getting the hydration it needs.
It’s best to water your lawn in the early morning since the water isn’t absorbed right away; you don’t want sunlight to cause it to evaporate. If you’re struggling to get your heat-damaged lawn back to its original condition, you don’t need to do it alone. Working with a landscaping company like The Parke Company can ensure your lawn recovers quickly despite the Nashville heat.
Preventing Heat Stress
Of course, the best way to keep your lawn looking good is to ensure it never gets too dry. Setting up sprinklers or spraying your lawn can be time-consuming, and it’s hard to get it exactly right. Irrigation system installation services take the guesswork out of watering, ensuring a consistent schedule and distribution of moisture to your lawn when it needs it most. In-ground sprinkler systems can be set to a timer that comes on early in the morning, so you don’t even need to get out of bed to get your lawn properly hydrated.
As mentioned earlier, it’s not wise to install a system in the summer months, so you need to plan ahead for the fall. While modern pipe systems are small, they still require digging and uprooting parts of the lawn. Irrigation systems aren’t cheap, but there are many types of installations, and chances are there is a system that can work within your budget. If your yard is important to you, a sprinkler system is the single biggest investment you can make into your home and lawn. An irrigation system isn’t a magic cure for heat stress, but it can make things much simpler. You won’t miss a watering while you’re on vacation for the weekend; just set your system and relax.
Defend Your Lawn Against Heat Stress
Since each lawn needs different care, it’s best to get as much information and support from the experts as possible. Work with The Parke Company to establish a maintenance plan to ensure your system is working efficiently and free of issues. Protecting your lawn takes a lot of planning, but it’s not hard to do with some help, even when facing a particularly nasty Nashville heat wave.
Need some help handling a sun-stressed lawn, or looking to get the jump on planning your new irrigation system installation? Don’t let heat stress you and your lawn out! Give us a call today at the Parke Company for expert advice and service.