Fertilize your lawn in October before the first heavy freeze, no matter if you have a cool or warm-season grass – but use a winterizer fertilizer. Common winterizing fertilizer formulas are 18-6-12 or 15-5-10 which come in organic and non-organic products. The winter weeds are germinating a lot in the fall, and getting ready for next year, so make sure you apply a pre-emergent as soon as possible. The best time to apply a pre-emergent to combat winter weeds is in August or September, but if you haven’t done so yet, do it now! By attacking the weeds now, you can do more about weed control than you can in the spring or summer. There are winterizer fertilizers that include pre-emergents so you can knock both out with one shot. If you have a lot of leaves, mulch them up and apply them to your lawn. They won’t contribute to thatch and they act almost as another fertilizer application for the turf.
If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can hire a company, Excalibur uses TruGreen, to complete the service. If you are an Excalibur client, contact your property manager today to get on the list for TruGreen service. You can submit an online maintenance request if you would like by clicking this link: http://www.excalhomes.com/ContactUs.html.
Lastly, mowing is the single most important thing you can do to manage the vigor of your grass and its ability to compete against weeds. In the fall, the best results are obtained by mowing at the highest setting on your mower. In no case should the mowing leave the grass less than 1.5 inches tall. This will help insulate the grass during the winter.
Blog Post by John Durham, Marketing Director with Excalibur Home Management
Excalibur is an Atlanta Property Management company servicing the Metro Atlanta area
Filed under: Preventative Maintenance Topics Tagged: | Atlanta property management, Excalibur Home Management, Fall lawn maintenance, Fall maitenance, landlord maintenance
