Springtime is the time that most of us put aside to get the house cleaned up and ready to enjoy for another 12 months. But did you know that the outside of your home, namely the lawn, also needs attention in the spring?
Now, the lawn does need attention throughout the year too, for example having your annual Grub Reduction Application to control the European Chafer Beetle. But for this article, we will be discussing the importance of Spring maintenance and the benefits to you.
An annual Core Aeration offers you and your lawn a number of wonderful benefits, but the most important one being that it helps your lawn through the hot dry BC summer. How? Well, when the Core Aeration is done, it pulls plugs of soil out of the lawn decompressing the soil.
When this happens, the grass roots have a lot more room to grow. In a lawn with a compacted soil, most of the root growth occurs close to the surface, and this creates a lawn that is highly susceptible to summer drought. A Core Aeration opens up the soil so water, fertilizers and air can penetrate deep, encouraging roots to grow deep, resulting in a lawn better able to tolerate periods of summer drought as the roots will search for water and nutrients from deeper in the soil.
We've all had the pleasant experience of walking barefoot in the yard and feeling how cool the grass is underfoot. That's not an illusion. Grass plays an important part in controlling our climate.
Your lawn can reduce temperature extremes by absorbing the sun's heat during the day and releasing it slowly in the evening, thus moderating temperature. Grass cools itself and its surroundings by the evaporation process. In fact, the cooling properties of grass are so effective that temperatures over grass surfaces on a sunny summer day will be 10 - 14 degrees cooler than over concrete or asphalt.
Like all living plants, grass takes up carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. Oxygen is essential for human life, but trapping carbon dioxide is also crucial, as too much CO2 can lead to elevated air temperatures and other environmental dangers. Grass not only removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but it also traps dust to keep it out of both the air and your lungs. Less dust blowing around means easier breathing, but also cleaner cars, cleaner houses, and cleaner windows.
To make sure that your lawn has all the strength it needs to complete this process, we recommend scheduling a Fertilizer application. Introducing the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to the lawn will make sure that the grass plant is healthy enough to clean that air.
When you walk through a city or even a crowded suburban area, you may notice how loud it is compared to your neighbourhood. That’s because lots of hard surfaces equal lots of areas for sound to bounce off. One big grass benefit is that a lawn acts like a blanket or insulation panel, absorbing sounds from people, cars, trucks, and animals.
In this springtime, it is important to ensure that you are introducing new grass seeds to the lawn to make sure that it is thick and lush enough to ensure that reduction in noise. In fact, since we mow our lawns they never have a chance to produce and drop their seeds. That’s why we need to introduce the new seeds so that they take the place of the ones that are dying off.
One of the major causes of our growing water quality problem is the runoff of contaminants from hard surfaces, such as roads and parking lots. Unfortunately, with expansion and building development open space is lost to these impervious surfaces.
Runoff can be reduced by establishing new lawns and turfgrass areas. Grass purifies the water as it leaches through the root zone and down into our underground aquifers. Soil microbes help break down chemicals into harmless materials.
This filtration system is so effective rainwater filtered through a good healthy lawn is often as much as 10 times less acidic than water running off a hard surface.
So what services should be done in the springtime to make sure that you are taking advantage of all these benefits? Here at Nutri-Lawn Vancouver, we recommend the following:
- Core Aeration: this is to relieve some of the compaction in the lawn and allow the roots to be their healthiest.
- Fertilizing: all living things need to eat - grass is no different! Our fertilizer uses a Polyon® technology Fertilizer that lasts in your lawn for up to 4 months!
- Seeding: All lawns need to have a seeding done at least once every two years. Depending on how thin or bare your lawn is will determine how much seed is needed. We recommend at least 8 pounds of seed for every 1,000 square feet of lawn space.
- Weed Control: weeds in the lawn are a sign of an unhealthy soil environment. One of the first steps to a healthy lawn is removing the unhealthy plants like weeds.
- Moss Shock: here in the Lower Mainland of BC we have a lot of rain. Which also means that we have a lot of acidity in our lawns. It is this acidity that the moss is attracted to and what helps it to grow. Having a Moss Shock application, in conjunction with a Power Rake will help to remove this plant from the lawn and allow you to plant grass seeds in its place.
For more tips on maintaining a healthy, beautiful lawn just call the experts at Nutri-Lawn Vancouver, we’re happy to help! Ready to purchase your services now? Why not check out our online shop here and get started today!