Professional Lawn Care Secrets

With our business at Athens Lawn Care & Service, it’s always been important to us to lead with value. Our business thrives by providing valuable services and maintenance plans for our clients  and we always seek to provide information, tips, and customized care for each lawn. In our few years of business, we’ve found that the relationships we build with clients, and the value we put forward to nurture those relationships, has been the driving force behind our continued business in Athens, GA. So, in the light of that, we decided to put together a couple of our professional lawn care lessons we’ve learned over years of experience, and some secrets that lawn care professionals would agree with. So, here goes!

One of the first tips that may seem basic, but is one of those things that most people really don’t seem to grasp with DIY lawn care is that you absolutely must be willing to put in more effort than your expecting to, more days a week than you planned to. What we mean by that is if you are after that green, lush, golf course grass, it’s going to take a lot more than weekly lawn mowing to get there. Healthy lawns take a lot of work to get that healthy, and that work includes working on your sprinkler system, fertilizing, 3 x a week mowings, and then tweaking the process month to month to ensure you’re giving the lawn what it needs to grow. 

The second secret of professional lawn care is making sure to understand your soil. The soil is where your grass seeds and grass growth will get the bulk of its nutrients, so it's valuable to understand what’s going on with your soil, so you can treat it accordingly. Treating your grass while neglecting your soil is like spraying febreze over a dirty room. It’s not going to really help until you get to the root of the problem. Sprinklers are also an invaluable part of maintaining a healthy soil. If you don’t have a working sprinkler system, it's going to be very hard to achieve bright green, healthy grass. On top of that, don’t worry about comparing your lawn to your neighbors lawn. Different lawns can have vastly different soil requirements, and since you don’t know exactly how the soil at your neighbors house has been treated for the last decade, you really can’t compare. Different soils, different grass types, different leveling techniques during the building process- yep, these all play a factor. These are all reasons why we recommend reaching our to a professional lawn care company if you are really trying to achieve professional results. Your lawn care team should be able to take into account all of these factors, and take care of both your lawn and soil in a customized, intensive way. 

With all of that soil knowledge, a little sidenote is that it is always really helpful to get your soil tested every couple of years. Getting your soil tested will allow you to understand your soil PH, which can provide valuable insight into your lawn care strategy. A proper PH is vital for your grass to be able to get nutrients and moisture from the soil, so consider getting your soil tested if it’s been a while. 

Finally, our last tip is if you do choose to do your lawn care yourself, it is absolutely so important for you to read all instructions on every label before you apply anything to your lawn. Whether it’s fertilizer, weed control products, herbicide or other treatments, you need to know what the instructions are, and how much product you really need to apply to your lawn. When you are determining how much lawn coverage you have, you need to think of it in terms of your actual grass space, not the lot that your house sits on. For example, if you buy and apply fertilizer for a two acre space because you have a two acre property, you are going to do actual damage to your grass, because your grass occupies far less than two acres. If your house is half an acre of space, you have 1.5 acres of grass, and some of that includes your driveway. See how complicated this can get? Long story short, when it comes to applying product, take a minute to figure out exactly what the requirements are. Your lawn will be better for it.