Lawn Problems

I stopped at the building that abuts my office the other day and noticed that weed control is not a high priority for the owners. They went to great expense about three years ago to remove the old, grub-infested lawn that had all but died. A great deal of time and effort went in to loaming and seeding this lawn but other than occasional mowing, it has received no maintenance. It is only a matter of time before the new lawn is in the same condition as was the old. Pity. However, it makes for a great photographic study for us - we can learn from their mistakes.

It is that time of year when we field numerous inquires about moss, so let’s go over some basics.

The mosses are non-vascular plants – they have no xylem or phloem to conduct water and nutrients up and down throughout the plant – nor do they have roots. They take in water directly from the atmosphere through their leaves. As plants, even as ‘lower plants’, they conduct photosynthesis, which should be obvious due to their green color.

Springtime is not normally a time of year that we think of when we consider drought, but indeed, here we are. After a 2011 with an abundance of rainfall, too much actually, we have managed to accumulate a 6+" deficit in rainfall in the Lawn Dawg service area. Particularly hard hit is the southeastern portion of Massachusetts right at the moment.

It’s now coming up on the middle of March, and the season is already off to a brisk start. I was speaking to Lawn Dawg Vice President Tom Bucci as he was making the trip to our new Rochester, NY branch the other day and instead of the typical mountains of snow along the interstate in the Syracuse area, all he saw was emerald green. Some winters are just like that – completely open. If you make your living plowing snow or you’re in the ski business, the season was a bust.

In the winter months, there are pests of turfgrass that because of the dormancy of the lawns become far more noticeable to us.

Moles

As I gaze out my office window at my front lawn I see an unfamiliar color – brown. In the midst of the ‘winter that wasn’t’, my lawn never really retreated fully into dormancy. Normally, all things considered, the lawn will stay green through Christmas and then go to sleep. Not so this year. Although I haven’t had to cut, there most definitely has been photosynthesis going on. The thermometer is now stuck at a balmy nineteen degrees and the lawn is fast asleep. Or so you would think.

Snow? In October?

If what the old farmers used to say, that snow is a poor man's fertilizer, then we're all rich this morning. A blanket of white covers most of the Lawn Dawg service area ranging from a dusting towards Plymouth, MA to fifteen inches near Nashua, NH to over twenty inches near Poughkeepsie, NY. Television meteorologists can hardly help themselves - their reports are full of broken records here and superlatives there. Normally, the official color of Halloween is black, this year it's white.

Crabgrass

The dog dawg days of August are upon us a little early this year with temperatures headed into the high 90-degree range with oppressive humidity later this week.

When temperatures get this high, lawns really do not like it too much. There are two different stresses that turfgrass plants endure in weather like this. They can occur together or separately.

You’re ornamental tree is most likely suffering from a disease called powdery mildew, which can also occur in your lawn. Powdery mildew is characterized by individual colonies of fine, white mycelium on the leaves which eventually grow together and cover the entire leaf. This results in the grayish-white, powdery appearance seen on the leaves.