Time to take advantage

The mild summer has set up lawns for success this fall. With less heat and drought stress, lawn care operators dealing with cool season grasses can take full advantage of the fall growing season before winter sets in.

“A lot of times you get hit with a lot of heat and drought stress, a lot of disease damage, and this is the time of the year that we’re trying to kind of get the lawn back up to snuff because it’s been kicked pretty hard,” says Shawn Karn, agronomic manager of Nutri-Lawn Corp. in Toronto. “Given the summer that most locations had, I would just tell people take advantage of the good growing conditions that the fall has to offer.”

For both cool and warm season grasses, fall is fertilizing time. Grasses need an application of nitrogen to aid in fall color and spring recovery, as well as winter weed resistance, which might be popping up earlier than usual this year, according to Bert McCarty, professor of turfgrass management at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C.

“This time of year, you have to make sure you’ve got your winterizer or fertilizer out,” he says. “If our winter is as bad as this past winter, that is a good, sure way to make sure that you have the best defense against the cold temperatures.”

For both warm and cool season grasses, McCarty also recommends raising mower heights to get a deeper rooting going into the winter, especially in shady areas.

Because precipitation is more common in most areas when the weather cools down, it’s the perfect time to lay down fertilizer, Karn says. “It’s easy to take advantage of this time to get the plant ready for, in the cool season climate, ready before it goes to bed because the snow will be here soon and you want the turf to be going in the right direction.” Although, there is much debate over the best time to fertilize, he notes.

Karn takes advantage of the small window of a few weeks when the blades have stopped growing, but the soil isn’t frozen yet. The idea is that even though the shoots have stopped growing, the roots are still growing.

“A good time to fertilize is late fall because it increases the root growth and essentially the roots build up a carbohydrate reserve that will assist it during the winter, making it less susceptible to winter turf injury like snow mold,” he says, adding that the reserves will also help with cold hardiness. “And then when spring comes, it can use those carbohydrate reserves to sort of bring itself back up in a more natural way than just pounding it with fertilizer come April 1.”