Cleaning Up Your Own Backyard

How to Get Your Lawn Ready for Spring

by Warren Garcia

Spring is approaching, and it is time to prepare your yard and lawn for the upcoming warm season. In addition to watering, feeding, and weeding your lawn and aerating the soil around your lawn's roots, you need to protect your lawn's health with proper mowing and removal of excess thatch build-up. Here are some tips to help you complete these important tasks.

Prepare Your Lawn Mower

After an entire season of using your lawn mower to care for your lawn (and then an off season sitting in the shed), your mower may be in need of a tune-up and some simple maintenance to get it ready for the upcoming season. Your lawn mower can get quite a workout from regularly mowing your lawn, and its blades can become worn down and damaged from accidentally mowing over rocks and other hard objects. For this reason, it is important to have your mower's blade sharpened to ensure it can cut your lawn appropriately.

A dull mower blade will pass over your lawn and tear the tops of the grass blades. This shreds the ends of your lawn blades and causes their tips to turn brown, leaving your lawn with a dry appearance. This can also stress your lawn out each time you mow, which can put it at risk of diseases.

Take your lawn mower to a landscaping equipment repair business like Eastlake Rent-All Inc to have the blades sharpened and all its components checked and cleaned. This additional work will help your mower work better through the year and minimize the chances of your mower breaking down.

De-Thatch Your Lawn

Once your lawn mower is ready for cutting your lawn, you can use a blade attachment to de-thatch your lawn. Your lawn will naturally collect a dead layer of grasses that builds up upon the soil and around the bases of each lawn plants. When this layer becomes too thick, especially in the spring, it can block nutrients and moisture from fully reaching your lawn's roots.

Check the layer of thatch in your lawn by spreading apart a section of grass. Poke your finger into the dead organic matter to see how thick it is. If your lawn's thatch layer is a half-inch thick or less, it is a healthy thatch. Anything more than that should be treated and reduced.

Using a de-thatching blade on your mower will pull up this debris, and you can collect it in your mower's collection bag.You can also hire a landscaping company to complete this service for you if you do not have the tools or ability to remove the thatch in your lawn.

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