Category: Lawn Care Tips

Altoona PA Lawn Service – Red Thread Disease

Posted on July 12, 2010 in Lawn Care Tips, Lawn Disease

Have you ever had a brown patch with a reddish tinge on your lawn and wondered what it is? If it’s not spray paint or your kid’s paintball gun, it’s probably red thread lawn disease. Red thread is not the deadliest lawn disease, but you don’t want to take it lightly. Severe cases of this disease can kill the grass completely.

Red thread lawn disease is common in red fescue grass and perennial ryegrass. Bermuda, bentgrass and Kentucky bluegrass are sometimes affected.

Read more about red thread lawn disease

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Altoona PA Lawn Disease – Dollar Spot Disease

Posted on July 12, 2010 in Lawn Care Tips, Lawn Disease

Dollar spot disease is a kind of lawn disease that kills and infects different kinds of grasses. This disease grows in distinct and small circles around the size of a small pancake or a silver dollar. It is easy to take the dollar spots lightly because they do not look dangerous but they can cause serious damage to the lawn.

Dollar spot disease survives during winter in the plant parts in the soil and thatch and it begins to start again as the temperature gets to sixty degrees. Aside from temperature, other factors that cause the disease include low fertility of nitrogen, low moisture in soil when humidity is high, too much mowing during hot climate, and too much thatch. A quality program is needed to provide the lawn proper mixture of fertilizers in order to prevent dollar spot. In addition, lawn should be mowed or watered regularly.

Read more about dollar spot disease by clicking here

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Test Your Lawns pH Level

Posted on July 8, 2010 in free lawn care help, Lawn Care Tips

Dandelions love a pH of about 7.5. Grass loves a pH of about 6.5. So if your pH is 7.5 or higher, your grass will probably never beat out the dandelion. Lower the pH to 6.5 and your grass has the advantage!

Be sure to have your pH tested professionally. The kits that you can buy in the store will often give you the wrong information. I once spent $18 on a pH meter that told me that my lawn pH was 6.0 when it was really 7.8. So I should have added gardeners sulfur, but instead I added lime!.

If you’re going to buy a pH tester, be prepared to spend around $85 for the tester and the calibration solutions. A long time ago I bought the Oakton pHTestr 2 plus 4.0 and 7.0 solutions. I think most folks will wanna keep their $85 and just pack some soil samples to the local extension office.

A little side note: a dusting of lime on the soil surface has been shown, in most cases, to nearly double earthworm reproduction.

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Golf Shoes for Your Lawn? Yeah. Try It.

Posted on July 7, 2010 in Lawn Care Tips, Organic Lawn Care

I personally know a man who lives in Bellwood PA. He walks on his lawn atleast once a month with regular golf shoes. The spikes in the golf shoes act as an aeration device. They poke small holes the soil and allow water and oxygen to enter the root system of the grass. Give this a try monthly, or let us aerate your lawn and watch the difference appear in only weeks. You will have a lawn greener than all of your neighbores.

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Home Made Fertilizer

Posted on July 7, 2010 in Lawn Care Tips, Organic Lawn Care

Simple solution.

Take 2 cups of water, 1 cup of beer, 1 cup of amonia, and 1/2 cup of epsom salt. Mix this together in a spray bottle of some sort and go out and spray your lawn.

The water won’t do much but equal out the mixture, the amount of water applied really doesn’t help anything.

The beer will feed the root systems.

The amonia will kill and diseases that are living on the grass.

The epsom salt will work as an aerator and help the water penatrate the soil.

Spray this on your lawn and in a couple of weeks your should notice an improvement!

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