Is your lawn dry and brown? Is the hot sun beating down on it daily and making it worse?
What can you do?
Luckily, grass is hard to kill. It may look dead, but it’s really just sleeping. It’s waiting for a kiss from its true love, and that’s you.
Drought, or Just Dry?
Your first step in fixing a dry lawn is determining if your area is in the midst of a bona fide drought, or if it’s simply going through a dry spell. If it’s a drought, you might be under water use restrictions.
In this case, what you may be able to do, at least for your plants, is re-use bath and shower water by collecting it in the tub and then either scooping it into a watering can or siphoning it into a barrel. This won’t work for your whole lawn, though, unless you live in a townhouse.
What you don’t want to do during a drought is water sporadically. If you are not under water restrictions and you water your lawn when you have time or when you think of it, you could actually be making the problem worse.
In the same way your metabolism eventually adjusts to a new weight-loss diet, so your grass adjusts to less water, and conserves it, so it will be confused by random infusions of water.
Water
If you’re certain you can provide your lawn regular waterings, by all means, start with this. Give it a good soaking, preferably at or just before dawn. Be mindful of sloped or hilly areas where water can quickly run off and pool at the bottom.
Fertilize
After a couple of weeks of good watering, your previously dry lawn should have beefed up its root structure enough to benefit from some fertilizer. One of the most popular fertilizer mixes is high in nitrogen, but this is just the one you want to avoid for a dry lawn. Choose a 4-1-2 mixture instead.
Apply Weed Killer
A lawn infiltrated by weeds is a weak lawn, and yours is already weak because it’s been so dry. The fewer weeds you have, the more grass you have, and eventually the tables will turn and your grass will push out your weeds instead of vice versa.
Don’t cover your whole lawn with herbicide while it’s still in recovery, though. Poison each weed individually.
Keeping grass nice and healthy is a lot of work, and is best left to retirees and hobbyists. If neither of these is you, call Earthworks Landscaping. We can get your dry lawn back into shape quickly and you won’t have to lift a finger.
