How Often Should You Water Your Lawn?

How Often Should You Water Your Lawn?

As the summer heat starts, many lawns in Pennsylvania are showing signs of heat and drought stress. Continue reading to learn more about helping your turfgrass stay green and vigorous until cooler temperatures arrive in the fall.

Watering Your Lawn In The Summer: Keeping your lawn irrigated the right way during the hot summer months is the best way to keep it healthy. Proper watering prevents things like water stress, insect damage, and turf disease.

When To Water Your Lawn:  The best time to water your lawn is early in the morning before temperatures begin to rise. Getting your turfgrass watered early helps ensure that it is already hydrated by the time the summer sun is beating down on it. Early morning watering will help your lawn withstand the day’s heat without wilting or drying out.

Don’t Water After Sundown: All plants, including turfgrass, photosynthesize when the sun is out. Daylight hours are when they take the water up through their roots and expel it from their pores, or stomata, on their leaf surfaces.

Don’t Irrigate If It’s Raining: During those summer rainfalls, be sure to turn off your irrigation system. Rain will naturally supply irrigation for your lawn, so it won’t need more watering. 

Summer Lawn Mistakes

If you have difficulty keeping your lawn green and healthy in the summer, it may be because you aren’t watering it right. Below are some common lawn problems related to watering mistakes, and the reasons behind them.

Mistake #1

Your Lawn Is Turning Brown: Oh no! If you see your green lawn turning brown, it could be due to one of two common reasons.

Water Stress: Turfgrasses have shallow roots systems (about 4” deep). It doesn’t take long for the soil around their roots to dry out.

Summer Dormancy: This is a common plant stress response to drought and high temperatures.

The good news is that by adjusting your watering schedule, not mowing your grass too short, and choosing a turfgrass mix designed to withstand high heat, you can keep your grass green all summer long!

Mistake #2

Your Lawn is Turning Yellow or Wilting:  Too much irrigation can stress your lawn the same way too little watering can. What happens is, overwater suffocates your turfgrasses’ roots by saturating the soil and filling soil space (or pores) that would otherwise provide the needed oxygen for your lawn.

Steps to fixing an overwatered lawn:

• Reduce how much water you give your lawn

• Reduce the frequency at which you irrigate

• Make sure your irrigation system isn’t running during summer rainstorms

If you don’t see improvement after changing your irrigation schedule, your lawn may need aerating. Core aeration this fall will improve water drainage and prevent waterlogged soil.

DID YOU KNOW? Lawn aeration can help with drought stress, as compacted soil and thatch buildup can prevent irrigation water from reaching roots. If your soil is compacted or thatch buildup is choking your lawn, irrigation water will run off instead of soaking into your soil.

Mistake #3

Your Lawn Has Dead, Dying, or Discolored Patches: If your lawn is mostly green but has areas of red, brown, dead grass, or round spots of yellow grass - you may have a pest problem or a fungal disease. Humid weather and high temperatures combined with irrigation create an ideal setting for fungal diseases to flourish.

In Eastern Pennsylvania, some of the common pets we see include: white grubs (Japanese beetles) and chinch bugs.

To help prevent fungal problems, consider applying a lawn fungicide. Adjusting your irrigation cycles will also help prevent the spread of fungal growth. As well as using a gentle fertilizer to encourage healthy, new grass to grow when temperatures moderate in the fall. 

Quick Tips!

Don’t Overseed Your Lawn in The Summer: When new grass blades start growing, they have tiny root systems. Temperature spikes and even brief periods of insufficient water will quickly kill these little sprouts.

Don’t Over Mow Your Recovering Lawn: A nicely mowed lawn may look nice, but over-mowing will further stress your turfgrass. Mowing the grass too short and too often reduces the amount of grass that photosynthesizes and produces food energy. This will slow down your lawn's growth rate, as well as the ability to recover from mistakes.

Over mowing can increase the chance of drought stress. Cutting down longer grass blades that shade the roots means your soil will lose moisture faster.

Don’t forget, an over-mown lawn lets more sunlight reach the soil surface, which encourages pesky weed seeds to germinate!

We’re Here To Help!

If your lawn isn’t looking as good as you want it, or has dead, bare discolored areas, we recommend fall aeration and overseeding. We normally do aeration through September. Which makes now a good time to learn about core aeration for lawns and how overseeding the fall will give you a lush, beautiful, green lawn in spring.

Give us a call at (570) 889-5366 to get on our fall lawn care schedule!