As we move towards the end of winter, isn’t it nice to gain the extra few minutes of daylight each day? Walks during the sunset, beautiful golden sky-lines and cosy “nights in” now seem the norm.
Grass Growth – Always a Tough Time Through Winter!
The recent cold snap in January lasted much longer than forecast and slowed up the growth of some fast-forward plants, that had been rushing upwards in the mild weather over Christmas. Generally, at this time of year, lawns will not look their best – it’s a fact: Valentine’s Day is the worst day to look at a lawn because it’s had to fight its way through the scourge of Winter and soil temperatures have yet to rise, helping grass and plant growth spurts.
Dealing with Moss – An Inhibitor to Early Grass Growth
During Winter, moss will be showing up much more vibrantly than grass, making grass look a lot more worse-for-wear, than it really is, as moss always grows faster than grass, due to lower-light levels during the winter. Did you know that grass plants generate energy in the form of carbohydrates direct from sunlight (think photosynthesis in biology)? Therefore, when light levels are lower, they create less energy and this is when moss gains a foothold and is why we tend to see more moss in shady areas.
Mowing less in the Autumn and leaving the grass longer helps a lot. Although it’s tempting to give it “one last cut”, the more leaf area we leave, the more the plant can intercept light and remain healthy at the end of winter. It’s still a little too early to be thinking about cutting grass.
“If the weather turns cold again and it has been cut, this will cause the grass plants significant stress”
Spring is a good time to make sure that your lawn mower blades have been sharpened, as this does reduce the plant damage significantly when we do mow, as blunt blades do damage your grass in its early stages of growth.
Our current visits – and a priority to our customers – are aimed at dehydrating moss (removing moisture from moss): in most cases, the blackened moss will soon disappear, as the grass begins to grow. In a few cases, we may suggest scarifying – the removal of plant matter including crowns, stolons, rhizomes, and roots (see here) – but we tend not to scarify in the Spring, as due to recent climate changes, we seem to go straight from Winter to Summer and miss out Spring, which means that grass and plants often dry out too quickly in the interim.
Lawn Care Starts in Spring – Help Your Grass Blossom in Summer!
We have a number of lawn maintenance customers that suffered heatwave damage during last Summer and now that winter in on its way out, those customers are our priority, so that seeding can germinate whilst there is plenty of moisture. This methodology is less caustic than scarifying and, in turn, stresses lawn grass much less.
Once we journey into March, lawn care becomes far more extensive, with work conducted often being part of a longer-term lawn strategy. To find out more about the specialised lawn treatment work we provide, contact us.
Soil, Nutrients & Herbicides – Feeding Grass and Plants Correctly!
Nourishing the foundation of grass or plants (the area they grow in: soil, nutrients, water, pest control) should be an integral part of any lawn-care treatment programme.
When we start to see a significant rise in soil temperature, we start to plan the first application of nutrition. This first large dose helps the grass as it grows rapidly, to produce lots of fleshy leaves. This way, grass leaves harnesses sunlight to replenish depleted carbohydrate reserves, while generating lots of energy, to help it create a seed head, so that it can reproduce. Obviously, where lawns are cut regularly, plants are unable to produce a seed head. However, in the natural grass growth-cycle (uncut lawns), this is what happens, resulting in lush green lawn growth in early Spring.
Our aim is to make sure that we have the right blend of macro-nutrients to help your plants flourish, we do this partly by:
- Looking at winter rainfall levels, as some nutrients are more temporary than others and wash through the soil profile in wet Winters
- Taking soil samples and have them analysed to investigate what the backgrounds levels are like. This way, we can choose the right nutrition for the soils, for each application
There will still be some weeds present that germinated late into the Autumn. We do have a wide range of selective herbicides to deal with all types of weeds, but the weather is still too cold for them to work properly, so we won’t be able to treat weeds at this time, but will do so, as soon as the weather allows.