Could Your Mowing Skills Be Ruining Your Lawn?

Mowing the lawn is a task that’s easy to write off on the list of home maintenance charges. Paying someone else to do it, or having your teenager earn some allowance money pushing around the mower might seem like an easy way to get the task done, but there are actually ways to harm your grass and it’s potential for growth if you’re not serious about how it’s being cut.

Here are some of the ways mowing your lawn improperly, can cause issues.

Dull Blade

Mowing your lawn with a dull blade will cause hard because instead of cutting the blades of grass shorter, it will just tear at the grass. This not only makes grass appear raggedy and change to a white color where the grass has died, but it also leaves room for disease to grow and pests to harbor.

For the best looking grass, make sure your blade is perfectly sharp and re-sharpen it over the course of the mowing season or buy an extra blade to prevent grass damage.

Cutting too Short

Cutting your grass too short is another issue that plagues its appearance. Standard heights of 2 ½ to 3 inches is as short as you should go if you don’t want to expose too much of the stem tissue which can turn the grass brown or yellow. Going too short also leaves room for more weeds to grow and can leave you with a patchy lawn that has more dirt showing than grass at all.

Frequent Mowing

Depending on where you live, how shaded your house is and how much rainfall and sunshine you’re getting the common frequency for mowing lawns is one time per week. This allows enough time for the grass to grow about 3 inches or more before being trimmed to avoid damage. But you should assess and monitor your own property and decide if you need to spread those cutting sessions out to longer periods of time. Optimal conditions of dry grass and shade are best for keeping the blades healthy in the cutting process.

Your Grass Needs Water

If your lawn doesn’t look too pretty, it’s not totally your fault. Even if you take in all of these tips and practice them faithfully, you’ll still run into issues with your lawn if it’s not getting the proper amounts of water and nutrients to grow healthfully. Consider have a sprinkler system on timers installed to take the guesswork and heavy lifting out of the equation. These systems can be set-up with some simple know-how and will save you tons of time and aggravation.

Shop Sprinkler System Store for all your lawn watering and sprinkler system essentials.