As cold lingers, follow this schedule when spring starts to pop for a beautiful lawn

It seems like the past month has had a weekly cold snap that’s kept us thinking about winter. This week is certainly no exception. However, there’s going to come a day sometime very soon when everything will start to pop and when lawns will be top things on our minds. Let’s take a quick peek at things you’ll need to do in chronological order.

Scalping

This is a term referring to dropping your mower blade down one or two notches so you can mow off all the browned stubble left over from winter. Scalping removes many of the winter weeds. It allows the sun’s rays to reach the soil. The ground will warm more quickly and the grass will usually green up a week or two earlier. Normally by now we might already have finished this scalping, but this week’s cold weather has convinced us to wait a week or two longer.

Clippings removed by scalping should be bagged or raked and removed. Do not leave them on top of the lawn. They’re great additions to your compost pile, or you can use them as a dry mulch around shrubs and perennials. Just don’t send them to the landfill. They contain valuable minerals, plus the landfill really doesn’t have room for them unless your city has a recycling program for organic yard waste.

Don’t confuse scalping with aerating or dethatching. These are both processes aimed at removing impenetrable accumulations of undercomposed organic matter that form beneath the runners and on top of the ground. Water and nutrients have a hard time getting through thatch and into the soil where they can be utilized by plants’ roots.

Aeration is the better means of handling thatch. It involves pulling plugs of thatch out of the turf so that air can get into the layer to speed the decay. However, that’s very rarely needed in most home lawns. Only if you’re certain that you have a thatch layer beneath the runners should you rent a core aerator, and in that case, that would best be done from late March through mid-May. (For the record, the “aerating golf shoes” and other inexpensive aeration gimmicks are of almost no value.)

Weedkillers

There are two types of weedkiller products you may want to use sometime soon, and it’s critical that you understand the difference between the two.

“Broadleafed weedkillers” are used to eliminate weeds such as dandelions, clover, henbit, chickweed, thistles, dichondra and plantain that you can see growing in your lawn right now. That means that these are post-emergent weedkillers used to kill weeds that have already germinated. Most of them sprouted back in early fall, probably around Labor Day. At this point you’ll want to apply a product containing 2,4-D broadleafed herbicide strictly according to label directions to eliminate all non-grassy weeds in your lawn.

“Pre-emergent” weedkillers should be applied between March 5 and March 15 in the Metroplex to prevent germination of summertime grassy weeds, crabgrass and grassburs. These are granular products that attack seeds as they germinate, hence the phrase pre-emergent (before they germinate).

The three most common pre-emergent weedkillers are Halts, Dimension and Balan. All are sold as granules, and all are suitable for use on any type of turfgrass so long as it has been through at least one winter in your landscape. They are effective for about 100 days, so you will want to apply a “booster shot” treatment 90 days after your first treatment. To revisit the part about timing: These should be applied approximately two weeks prior to the average date of the last killing freeze for your area and repeated 90 days later.

There are products in the market that allow you to apply fertilizers and weedkillers at the same time. It is my personal belief that these procedures are better performed separately. As I’ll explain next, this is not the time to apply fertilizers to most permanent turfgrasses here, but if you wait for prime time for feeding, you’ll be too late for the weedkillers I’ve just mentioned.

Fertilizing

For the most part we all grow warm-season turfgrasses in Texas. Those are grasses that gear up to grow once temperatures start to warm in late March and April. They shut down with the first freeze of the fall. The list includes bermuda, St. Augustine and zoysia (also buffalograss, although I don’t recommend it since bermuda almost always overtakes it).

Those grasses aren’t really ready to utilize fertilizers until April in north central Texas. Feeding times for bermuda are early April, early June, early August and early September. For St. Augustine and zoysia I’d suggest early April, early June and early September.

Research from Texas A&M and elsewhere has shown that clay soils like we have here in the Metroplex accumulate phosphorus (middle number of the 3-number analysis) to excess. It is very slowly soluble, and in those burgeoning amounts it can have harmful effects on our plants.

Soil scientists have determined that we should add all-nitrogen fertilizers (no phosphorus and hopefully little or no potassium) to all of the plants that we’re growing, turfgrasses included. Those same research scientists suggest that the plant foods contain upwards of half of that nitrogen in slow-release form.

Most other work needs to wait until April or May. That includes planting new grass, evening out a bumpy lawn and coping with shade. I’ll save details on those for a later time.

You can hear Neil Sperry on KLIF 570AM on Saturday afternoons 1-3 p.m. and on WBAP 820AM Sunday mornings 8-10 a.m. Join him at www.neilsperry.com and follow him on Facebook.

This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 5:30 AM.