You Need To Get Down On Your Hands And Knees

For any homeowner who is serious about caring for his lawn, you must occasionally get down on your hands and knees and get your eyeballs into the lawn. If you don’t do this once in a while you may miss an opportunity to discover early that small insects may have invaded your lawn or that a lawn disease is in its early stages.

When you’re looking closely at your lawn, look for unusual discoloration or spots on the leaf blades. Also, when you’re down and close like this you can get a pretty good idea of how sharp your mower blade is by how clean the cut is. If most of the cut leaves of grass do not have fuzzy white-ish fibers sticking out past the cut line, your mower blade is probably sharp enough.

If you’re examining your lawn close up and your lawn looks a little thinner than it has and the grass leaf blades appear to be folded along a center crease, this may indicate that the grass is trying to protect itself when it is very hot and dry. Although this is not necessarily cause for alarm, this folding of the leaves becomes quite obvious when you are down and close to the lawn. So if your lawn has been getting an adequate supply of water, then the folded leaves are just an interesting bit of plant behavior. Also on close examination, chances are pretty good that you will notice an insect, a spider or perhaps an ant here and there. But again, unless you find these in great numbers, you need not be concerned.

Most lawns are made up of several desirable varieties of grass. For instance, many bluegrass lawns also contain fescues and perennial rye. When standing over the lawn it can be very difficult to distinguish the different varieties that are mixed together. However, examining the length, width, color, smoothness, etc. of the grass blades when you are close up will help you identify the different types of grass that make up your lawn.

The whole point of getting down and close to your lawn is to become better acquainted with your lawn, the soil it grows in, and the insects that live there. And besides, getting down on your hands and knees and poking around through the grass can be a bit of an adventure. The kind of adventure maybe not experienced since childhood - and we could all use more of those.

NEXT TIME: I will try to post some links to information on the net that lawn care enthusiasts may find useful.