If you are looking at your lawn these days and saying, “It was so beautiful in the spring!” don’t despair.
Remember, fescue is a cool weather grass. When it gets really hot in the summer weeds, crabgrass and Bermuda grass out perform the fescue. This happens every year at this time to some degree, however, this June and July were the hottest in history.
It is not from the street as you are driving by in your car that you should compare your lawn to others, but when you are standing on them looking down. Chances are that if you are seeing a perfect lawn at this time of year it either has good shade or is being maintained by heavy and repeated doses chemicals and fertilizers, which are not kind to the Chesapeake Bay.
Let’s review what weeds and grasses you are seeing this August and why.
- Crabgrass flourishes in heat and has a thicker blade. It stays lower to the ground.
- Bermuda grass (wire grass) has a thinner blade and floats upwards above the lawn. Its root system goes eighteen inches deep, and it re-seeds easily.
- Nut sedge- generally likes it warm and wet from your irrigation system. It grows back quickly after a mowing and looks like a tall thicker grass. It is an annual which can be treated (and is) each year, but it just goes dormant in the soil comes back every year.
- Funguses like it warm and wet. We try to anticipate this each year, but it never goes away, but hides in the soil.
- Completely yellow lawns- are either dormant or dead. If there has been no water on a lawn and it is brown – it is dead. But if you have been watering your lawn and it is still yellow…it could just be dormant.
Hang in there! We are selectively spraying at this month in preparation for September aeration and seeding. We will not start aerations until the second week in September because of the amazingly hot weather.
Christie lives in Manakin Sabot , Virginia where she manages a 3 acre garden. Her blogs are written from her 35 years as a personal and professional gardener.
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