A green, healthy lawn for the Winnipeg climate
We have all heard the hockey saying “the best offence is a good defence.” The same holds true when you are trying to eradicate weeds from a lawn. Today we want to share some tips on maintaining a healthy lawn, which all starts with proactive measures in the spring. There are three steps to giving your lawn the best start it can get in the spring – power raking, core aeration, and top dressing with overseed.
Power raking is the process of removing dead plant material, debris, and thatch from your lawn. These materials naturally build up over the year and removing them helps keep the base of your lawn open to air, water, and nutrients. It also creates a clean base for the final step of top dressing with overseed. Power raking is done by a machine which uses blades to slice through the debris and thatch and bring it to the surface for removal.
The second step in spring lawn maintenance is core aeration. An aerator is a machine that removes small plugs of soil from a lawn. Aeration helps relieve soil compaction and allows more air to reach the root system of a lawn to promote healthy and vigorous new growth. Lawns growing on clay or silty loam (commonly found in Winnipeg), or ones that are heavily used, will benefit from aeration once a year.
The final step is to top dress and overseed your lawn, which is a very important step. Grass, if healthy, is great at suppressing weeds, but if a lawn is constantly mowed and never goes to seed it is not given a chance to propagate itself. It has to rely on other, less efficient methods of maintaining growth. Eventually it loses vigour and patches of soil start to open up allowing weeds to infiltrate your lawn. Top dressing and overseeding in the spring is the best way to prevent this from happening. The process is pretty simple, you put down a thin layer of new topsoil, gently work it into the grass, and then sprinkle a light layer of grass seed on top.
Performing these three steps in the spring will give your lawn a healthy star, and hopefully, a weed free summer. You can do it yourself, or you can give us a call and we’d be happy to help you out!