Taking the lawn into your own hands

Larry Roth lives in an east-side neighborhood where the homeowners association takes care of mowing and fertilizing all the fescue lawns – and they all are fescue.

But Roth, a retired railroad conductor who is so non-retiring that he does yard work for others, has his own requirements. They have caused him to mow twice already this spring.

“I like everything to look neat,” Roth said. “It’s kind of a reflection of yourself.”

Turfgrasses across Wichita have been greening up, starting with cool-season fescue, to be followed by Bermuda, zoysia and buffalo as the weather warms. The different grasses have some areas of care in common – crabgrass preventer can be applied to all of them now if crabgrass has been a problem in the past – but they have different needs when it comes to, for example, when they should be renovated and fertilized. (See accompanying calendar for details.)

While drought conditions the past few years have increased talk of moving away from popular fescue, extension agent Rebecca McMahon is not seeing any sustained trend of people choosing warm-season grasses, which require less water. But any lawn can be trained to use less water – starting in the spring – and any lawn in Wichita can be allowed to go dormant in the summer with no detriment to its health.

Fall is the ideal time to reseed a fescue lawn and fill in its thin spots, but there also is a window of spring when the job can be done, now through around April 15. Don’t fall for what McMahon calls “miracle grasses” that you might see featured in national advertisements. These grasses make fantastic claims such as staying green all year and being weed-free. One little problem, however, is that they do not tolerate Kansas heat, McMahon said. The name of one of them – Canada Green – gives you a clue, she said.

“If it sounds too good to be true, it is,” she told a class of master gardeners last week.

Instead, buy Kansas Premium Blend grass seed that is sold at garden centers, McMahon said. It contains varieties of fescue that K-State has found to be among the best for Kansas. The blends also have little to no weed seeds.

Roth overseeds his yard every three years whether it needs it or not. “I’ve got a verticutter that helps the seed make contact with the soil,” he said. He goes over the whole yard once, then goes over thin areas twice with the seed.

“It just gives it new life and vigor.”

Another option for renovating a fescue lawn is sod. The demand for sod keeps growing, said Ted Wilbur of the Sod Shop, and it can be put down most anytime the soil is not frozen. The busiest time is April 15 through the end of May, he said.

“The big trend that we’re seeing and that we’ve been working on the last two years is to develop fescue that uses less water. Water is becoming more expensive,” Wilbur said. Two years ago the Sod Shop started planting fescue recommended by the national Turfgrass Water Conservation Alliance. “It uses 30 percent less water,” Wilbur said. “We’re tickled to death with it.”

If your lawn is not thick enough to crowd out crabgrass and you’ve had a problem with it before, put preventer down ideally before redbuds are in full bloom, and definitely no later, McMahon said.

It’s still too early to fertilize any grass. One rule of thumb is never to fertilize brown grass, McMahon said – you’d just be wasting the fertilizer. Fescue can be fertilized in May if you didn’t fertilize it in the fall and/or you plan to water the grass in the summer heat rather than letting it go dormant.

While Roth has mowed his lawn twice already mainly to clean up the leaves and debris that had piled on top. He never cuts the blades shorter than 2 1/2 inches; fescue never should be cut any shorter. McMahon says that the latest research shows that keeping fescue at the same height all season is a safe practice. Roth likes to let his grass grow a little taller to about 4 inches in the heat of summer so that the blades provide more shade to the grass plants and reduce evaporation of soil moisture.

If you mulch-mow – which means you don’t bag the grass and dispose of it, but instead the clippings fall to the ground and break down there, providing nitrogen – you should mow often enough that you are not removing more than one-third of the blade at a time. Recommended mowing heights are 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 inches for tall fescue, 1 to 2 inches for Bermuda and zoysia, and 2 to 3 inches for buffalo. Those mowing heights are what you want the grass to be after you have cut the grass. That makes Bermuda the easiest when it comes to the one-third rule: You cut it when it is 3 inches tall and mow it down to 2 inches. When it reaches 3 inches again, you repeat.

Roth recommends that everyone core-aerate their lawn. Core aerating pulls out plugs of soil and turf, so that more oxygen and water can get to the roots and the soil is loosened up from being compacted by the mower and other traffic. The plugs are left on the lawn to decompose. K-State recommends doing the job in the fall for fescue.

“There’s probably people who never do it and they have a nice-looking yard,” Roth conceded, but he likes to do it twice a year. If you don’t have a core aerator, you can rent one, but he suggests that it could be cheaper to hire someone to do it for you.

“Hire it out unless you’re just into it like I am and think you have to do it yourself,” Roth said. “You think you’re doing a better job whether it’s better or not.”

Watering the lawn

Here’s how much water lawn grasses need, based on type and weather. Pair the guidelines with your own experience of your lawn, and dig into the soil a couple inches to check the moisture level before watering.

For Bermuda, zoysia and buffalo:

▪ Spring and fall: Generally don’t have to be watered.

▪ Summer: Apply 1 inch or so a week to keep them semi-green and out of dormancy. Or skip watering and allow them to go dormant.

▪ Extreme heat: Water half an inch every couple of weeks to keep them alive even when they are dormant.

For fescue:

▪ Spring and fall: Let the grass tell you when it needs water. When you step on the grass and the blades don’t spring back, or they turn a purplish or gray color, or the blades curl up on the ends, and the top 2 inches of the soil are dry, give the lawn an inch of water.

▪ When temperatures hit the 90s: Water one inch every three to four days to keep it green.

Or, if you let it go dormant:

▪ Normal summer: Water half an inch every two weeks, at one time, to keep the dormant grass alive.

▪ Extreme summer: Water half an inch a week, put on at one time, to keep the dormant grass alive.

To save water, all Wichita lawns can be allowed to go dormant in the summer at no detriment to their health.

Have a rain gauge and check it after every rain so that you can deduct that amount from how much you need to water.

If you need to irrigate the lawn, you should apply the water at one time, as long as the water does not run off. (If it does, stop the water, wait an hour or so, and start watering again, repeating until the inch has been applied and goes into the soil instead of down the street.) This deep, infrequent watering causes roots to reach deep and produces healthier grass that doesn’t need as much water.

This story was originally published March 26, 2015 at 5:56 PM with the headline "Taking the lawn into your own hands."