Taking care of a lawn and garden is a year round job for some. For those who get a brief break due to snow on the ground, there are still some things you might want to study up on before Spring.

The first thing to keep in mind is that Spring isn’t the only, and not always the best time to do prep work on your lawn. If you need to re-seed bare patches of the lawn, just before the first snowfall of the year is a good time to start. The seeds will get worked into the soil of the lawn by the weight of the snow and lay dormant for Winter.

Then, as Spring arrives with the first melt, the seeds will be in good mud and start the early stages of germination. As the sun hits them, you’ll get good, fresh grass in your lawn in a couple of weeks.

At the same time, since crabgrass and its relatives don’t thrive in the Fall or Winter, you have a head start on that kind of weed control. As the grass continues to spread, it has a better chance of crowding out crabgrass in the lawn, which may not develop at all.

Then you can apply the recommended Spring fertilizer to the lawn at the earliest possible week in the spring. That helps to give those young shoots a great beginning and, if you use weed control fertilizer, you can solve two problems with one effort.

As that snow continues to melt off you’ll find areas of the lawn where the grass has become thatched. That’s a condition in which the blades get lain over one another, then compressed from the snow pack on top. Some of them die over Winter. As a result, you have a kind of straw-like covering, hence the name ‘thatch’.

Solving that problem is easy, though. Just cut the grass a little later in Fall than you need to just for length control. That keeps the height down and helps keep thatching to a minimum.

Then, follow up in Spring by raking the grass. Of course, if you raked in the Fall, there won’t be any leaves to get rid of. Nevertheless, this helps pull up thatched areas and allows air to get to the soil.

If the ground has become hard, or the soil is the sort to easily become compacted, you can follow that up with an aeration on the lawn. There are several ways to do that. You can use a special attachment on a riding lawnmower and run it over the grass. There are also special large-drum rollers with spikes poking out you can use to areate the lawn.

A very inexpensive method involves using special shoes, somewhat like golf shoes with spikes on the bottom. You just put them on then walk around the area of the lawn that you want aerate. The shoes make tiny holes that allow air to easily penetrate the soil of the lawn. At the same time, it makes channels for solid fertilizer pellets to fall into.

After you’ve de-thatched and aerated, your lawn will be in good shape to carry out weed control, seeding, fertilizer application and regular mowing.

Whoever said lawn care was easy?
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