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Lawns Tips for lawn maintenance

Spring is just around the corner, which means caring for your lawn is just a few months away. If you are a new homeowner or if you are looking to brush up on your lawn care techniques, this article is just for you. A green healthy lawn will be kept looking beautiful and full when you keep the lawn healthy. A healthy lawn is not actually as difficult as one might think. 

What does your lawn need?
The grass in your lawn is going to need several hours of sunshine a day. For the most healthy lawns, at least six hours of sunlight a day is going to make your grass green. Your lawn is also going to require about a half inch to an inch of water a week. You can measure rain easily by purchasing a rain gauge (which is usually very inexpensive) or you can use a shovel and split open your lawn to see just how far down the moisture goes to determine how much water your lawn has been getting lately. Going down six or eight inches, you will find that if all the roots on your lawn are wet, you are getting enough water for this part of the growing season.

If you find that you are going through a drought, and your lawn is not getting all the water it needs for a healthy and thriving season, you should water your lawn. It is best to water your lawn in the morning, so that the water has a chance to soak in before the hot sun dries and evaporates the water. If you water in the middle of the day, the sun can burn your grass as the water will magnify the heat. Giving your lawn a good soaking just once a week is all that is really needed to keep it growing and thriving over the hottest portions of the summer seasons.

Another thing that you should remember when you want a full and green lawn is that you shouldn�t mow your grass to short. When you mow your grass too short it can die off turning brown. Cutting your grass so that it is still about three inches high will be the best situation for your grass. When the weather is a bit cooler, like for instance in the fall months, you can cut your grass about an inch shorter if you would like without putting too much stress on the grass and your lawn will still be thick, green and beautiful.

Your grass is going to need some amount of fertilizer over the year. Adding nitrogen or lime may be needed to balance the soil that your grass is growing in. To determine exactly what you need, and what you don�t need when fertilizing your lawn, purchasing an inexpensive test kit for your soil is going to be best. You can usually find these test kits in most all home centers and they will only run a dollar or two. A chart included with the test kit will tell you exactly how to test your soil, and how to read the results of your test.

For the best over all results in testing your soil, test it in six or seven different areas of your landscape. Fertilizing your lawn in the spring and again in the fall months is going to ensure that your lawn continues to look full and grow year after year. Applying fertilizer when it is not needed can also cause your grass to turn brown when you have too much of any one type of nutrient in the soil which is why the testing of the soil is important.

For areas of your lawn that look tramped down, where people often walk through the lawn, use a lawn fork, or an aerator and poke holes in the soil. Giving the grass looser soil, more air to the roots, and caring for these trampled areas, your path through the yard may not look as bad as it has in the past.

If you have bare spots in your lawn, adding a bit of new soil, mixed with fertilizer and grass seed in the spring and in the fall months, you can coax new grasses to grow in these hard areas. Sometimes the underlying problem is that there is a large rock under the soil that is collecting the heat from the sun and then in turn burning the grass that lives above this area. You can dig up the soil and pull out large rocks or old walkway stones if you have an area that is larger and will not grow grass at all.