Why Fall is the Best Season for Lawn Care PART 2

Zane Raudenbush, turf and herbicide specialist within the Davey Institute, talks about why fall is an optimal time to aerate your lawn and control your weeds.

In this episode we cover:  

• Is fall the best time to aerate? (0:36)
• What to do with aerate by-product (4:09)
• How often to sharpen your lawn mower blade (5:21)
• Lawn mower blade safety (6:26)
• Optimal grass height (8:41)
• Davey's experience with weeds (10:34)
• Why fall is the best time for weed control (11:42)
• Lawn care is in the eye of the beholder (14:40)
• Thatching (16:36)
• Dethatching (18:46)
• Zane being the 'turf guy' (20:22)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.  

To learn more about lawn care, read our blog, First-Time, New Homeowner’s Guide to Lawn Care.

To learn more about aerating, read our blog, How Often Should I Aerate My Lawn?

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
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Facebook: @DaveyTree
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LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!    

Transcript

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more, because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. Okay, friends, it's time for part two of our Turf Spectacular with our friend Zane Raudenbush from the Davey Tree Expert Company in Kent, Ohio. Zane, I want to kick things off with a question about aeration. Is fall the best time to aerate the lawn, or do I have that wrong?

Zane Raudenbush: No, you are correct. Fall is a great time to do aeration. It's a good time to do it, particularly, for people like myself who use their yard a lot. You're out there using it. You're compacting the soil with all the foot traffic, and then you're able to come back in the fall, remove some material, relieve the compaction, and then at the same time, here you have all these plants that are focusing on growing a lot of roots. It's like a perfect time.

Challenge can be that it can be dry, and if you've ever seen an aerifier that tries to go over a dry yard, they poke a hole about a half inch down into the soil profile. For the listeners out there, if you're somebody that is going to rent an aerifier, or you're going to hire a contractor to come in and do that, you really want to try to, if possible, have the yard be a little on the moist side. It doesn't need to be saturated, but if you have somebody come to do that surface service when the lawn is really dry, you'll see that you don't get the most bang for your buck because they simply can't.

The machine cannot pull that deep of a core when the soil is set up like a rock if you've ever tried to dig in dry soil. Ideally, if you're someone that can irrigate, you want to irrigate two nights before, the night before, to make sure that the soil is moist. That's going to help you get the most from that practice. If you're someone that's going to rent it, maybe try to look at the weather forecast and time it for a time when you know that there's going to be some rain leading up to that event.

Yes, Doug, you're spot on. Fall is a great time to do it, and I like to pair it with an overseeding. This should have been another thing I should have woven into my, "What do you focus on in the fall?" This is a perfect time. You'll hear me if you had me back on the podcast, I'm a big fan. The right plant in the right place and using superior plant material. Too often, I find that people will go to the store, they'll just pull something off the shelf and they'll throw it down without much thought.

Make no mistake about it, some of these species have some real weaknesses and some real strengths too. When you start to get into the landscape and if the lawn is struggling, there might be a reason for that. Maybe it is because it's shaded, maybe it's a wet area, maybe it's high traffic. Knowing what those stresses are will help you select some superior plant material to put the right plant in the right place. Taking that aerification, you come in, you're creating some holes for the seed to go into.

The problem with that is you don't create that many holes. You're bringing some material to the surface that helps the top dress get some loose soil up there on the surface to help make a seed bed. Aerification paired with an overseeding is a great way to be putting a little bit of money in the bank. You're maybe going to introduce 10% to 20% of new plant material into the lawn. You start doing that every other year, every year.

In three or four years, you really have changed the composition of the turfgrass stand, which that's what it's all about. That's what professionals do, Doug. It's not always we did this one practice and have totally changed the entirety of the stand. We're just constantly introducing new plants of superior genetics and over time, 10%, 15% adds up into something pretty special when you're at a place for four or five years.

Doug: That aerifier, it puts holes in the lawn and pulls out plugs. What do I do with those plugs that are all over?

Zane: I like to mow them. I will go over them and mow them and mulch them. This is a great way to dull a really sharp blade, so keep this in the back of your mind that after you do this, it's a good time then to freshen up that blade when you're done. I personally prefer to mow them. If you don't do anything, if you get a good rainfall event, that will help to get them to break down. For the listeners out there, if you're going to hire this service, this is a good time to go down and maybe cut the yard one notch shorter than you normally would.

That will help to tighten up the surface, and that will get a lot of the plugs to then lay on the surface and then come back through afterwards and mulch up those plugs. If it's really dry, your neighbors might be a little upset with you because it does make a bit of dust. If they're moist, you'll see they just break into a bunch of pieces, and it's pretty clean. If you don't have the ability to do that, they will break down, but it just can take a little bit more time.

Doug: All right. That leads me to another question. How often should that mower blade be sharpened?

Zane: That's a great question. I like to see people do it at least twice a year. Myself, I like you to start off the season with a fresh blade, so when you winterize your piece of equipment, change the oil, put fuel stabilizer in it, get the blade off, get it sharpened and properly balanced so you're starting the spring when we're going to have all this crazy growth with a fresh blade, right? You go through that spring months where that mower might mow more grass in a two-month period than it will mow in the rest of the season.

Then once you get through that time, I like to freshen it up again right after that in the early summer months because then you get into the summer where the plants are stressed, and you don't want to be cutting them with the dull blade at that time, right? I like to go through the summer where they're not nearly mowing as much grass with a sharp blade and run that into the end of the season. If you're somebody who would do this aerification and overseeding, and you run out there and you run that blade through a bunch of cores, then you maybe want to freshen it up one more time.

Doug: For me, that just means taking the blade off and taking it down to the hardware store, briefly discuss the importance of safety there. There's nothing more important. In my case, it's a battery-powered lawnmower. I'm taking the battery off, I'm being sure that thing can't rotate. In the case of a gas-powered mower, what do we do to safely take that blade off?

Zane: On a gas-powered mower, if you're going to safely take the blade off, you'll want to, if it's a push mower, you'll want to tip the mower on its side with the carburetor facing up, and you will want to disconnect the spark plug wire. When you disconnect it, don't just pull it off and let it sit because it can still arc across. Take a zip tie or something, make sure it's really pulled off to the side where it cannot come on, and touch the back of the spark plug.

Removing the spark plug is going to make sure that you're not going to potentially get any combustion in the cylinder. Then I like to find a piece of wood, like if you have any 4x4s and you cut a nice 4x4 square, I will wedge that in the deck. I'll rotate the blade, and I'll get that piece of 4x4 in there so that it wedges the blade. Then I will loosen the bolt to get off the blade. On an electric mower, make sure you do not have the battery pack in the mower, that there's no power source potentially on the mower at all.

Then if you're on a riding mower, that's something that you have to jack up. Again, the same thing, get the spark plugs off of the mower, make sure that the keys are not in it, that no one's going to go in there and try to turn the mower over. Particularly, with an electric mower, you have to be careful too, just because the spark plug is out of there, if somebody would turn the key that will still rotate the blade. You have to be a little bit more careful on a riding mower with electric start as well.

Doug: Let's talk about weeds. Hey, my favorite thing to talk about. Oh, wait, I have to go back one more thing. I remembered, how long should we keep the grass? You said cut it a little shorter. How long should it be during the season?

Zane: During the season, I like to see most homeowners mowing their yard at three inches. It can be even higher. You'll learn, Doug, I'm a big fan of turf-type tall fescue, and I like that grass because it thrives at a higher mowing height. In general, the higher you mow the turf, the less weeds that you're going to have in the lawn. Weeds are simply not as competitive at those higher mowing heights. I see low mowing heights. That's where we start to get a lot of the weedy grass species, like nimblewill, bentgrass, Bermuda grass.

Those are weeds that thrive at those low mowing heights. Again, the credit card trick. If listeners out there mow your yard, pull out a credit card, insert it lengthwise up down into the canopy. A credit card is three and a quarter inches long. You should be able to see maybe the whole credit card is buried or just a little bit of it is protruding up out of the canopy after you've mowed the yard. If you see that half the credit card is above the height of your mower, not the mower, but the height of the turf after you've mowed it, and you're cutting too short. I know that some people, Doug, love that look. They just love that really tight lawn and that's okay. It's your lawn, you just recognize that that's the thing that can allow for more weeds to encroach into the property and it certainly isn't as good for the turf. There's a direct relationship between the shoot height and the rooting depth. The longer the shoots are, the deeper the roots are going to be.

Doug: All right, that leads us right to weeds, your favorite topic.

Zane: That's right.

Doug: Probably everybody else's least favorite topic.

Zane: Sure, yes. At Davey Tree, if weeds are the thing that we receive the most phone calls about, people really key in on weeds. That's what a lot of lawn care, professional lawn care, what are there to do is control the weeds. This year has been a bumper year for crabgrass, that dry spell we got in the late spring there just seemed to thin the canopies out. The turf was under a lot of drought stress. That's a time when normally we'd have all this growth. We'd be developing a nice dense canopy, try and keep those weeds out and instead, we had the opposite.

We had drought conditions. If you didn't have the ability to irrigate, a lot of these yards went downhill. They finned. Anytime that you thin the turf and create voids. We all know where this story goes, that you're going to get weeds in there. Yes, crabgrass has been a real problem this year as compared to previous years. That's the thing I've received the most phone calls about is just crabgrass breakthrough, but the fall is a great time to be performing the weed control as well.

Another common misconception is I see a lot of weed control performed in the spring, which is sometimes needed to get control of winter annual weeds. The really tough-to-control weeds, things like wild violets, creeping Charlie and ground ivy, the speedwell species, mousy or chickweed, these are species that controlling them in the month of September because they're doing the same thing that the grasses are. All of the sugars that are being produced in the leaves, they're being sent underground.

If you're someone that's going to use herbicides, these selective herbicides that we can apply that will only kill the weeds, their movement is often dictated by the direction with which the plant is sending the sugars. If you've ever applied these products in the spring and you're like, "Well, we burned all the leaves off, but they came right back." That's often why because the plant isn't sending many reserves down. They're trying to create all these shoots for garnishing space.

Yes, fall that we're entering the month of September is a great time to go out and get your spot treater out. If you're someone that wants to spot-treat your yard for your weeds, this is a great time to do it. It can almost eliminate potentially the need to do it in the spring.

Doug: All those plants you just mentioned there are part of my quilted lawn.

Zane: Yes, they are.

Doug: Especially my violets, all right? I get that question every spring. What do I do about my wild violets, and my answer is enjoy them. They are a host plant for a bunch of butterflies. Now that doesn't always go over too well, Zane, but it's how much of tolerance you have for this sort of thing. For my lawn, which no one can see, as long as there's green stuff in there, that's all I care about.

Zane: Yes, it is interesting just to see the dynamic of what people do essentially tolerate. I don't know if you've ever had Dr. Adam Baker, one of my colleagues here from the institute. He's a pollinator ecologist. He's really shifted my mindset a little bit. I used to look at a bunch of violets in the lawn as a weed, and now I look at it a little bit differently that there is a lot of ecosystem services there. It can be a beautiful thing. If you're someone that looks at them as a weed, they can be tough to control.

It really comes down to the chemistry. You really need a herbicide in there that has the active ingredient triclopyr in the mixture. You need that to be at the appropriate rate. A little bit of searching, you'll be able to find that information. This is one of those that picking the right material for the job will save you from having to do it two or three times. Difficult to control weeds is all about the right chemistry at the right timing with the right application method.

Doug: It's also a cultural thing. If you live in a neighborhood where the lawn is an important part of being in the neighborhood, that's also part of this whole equation.

Zane: It is. There is no doubt that you live in a neighborhood where everybody has a really well-manicured lawn and yours isn't, that it will stick out and it will be noticed. That's beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I always drive that home in our trainings that turf grass is tough because it's a very subjective thing. You probably, I want to say like the services, you don't love those weeds, but maybe you recognize that they're doing some good out there and controlling them isn't that important to you.

I can assure you, Doug, that there are people that one of those in their yard is going to really upset them and they're going to want you there to control them. That's okay too. For us as a service provider, we need to make sure that we're always at the point of sale with the customer. What is your expectation? Because I want to know, is your expectation that there will not be a single weed in this property? We're even starting to get more customers that want those weeds.

They want us to find a way to have both. They want the turf and they want these flowering plants to provide habitat and forage for pollinators. It's a cool time for me to be honest with you. I'm excited to see where this goes. I think there's a much more opportunity to begin interseeding some of these pollinator plants into our lawns that can have the aesthetic component, that they still will look good and maybe even a little bit more wow factor than there currently is. People will still be able to have their nice lawn too. Striking that happy medium is pretty exciting.

Doug: Tell me about thatch, is it a problem? What is it? What do I do about it if we have it?

Zane: Yes. Thatch, the dirty word. No. Is it bad? No. In fact, some species, a little bit of thatch is really needed. Thatch is basically this area above the soil surface that's composed of old decaying crowns, shoot material. It's really a lot of lignified plant material. This can be stems and stolons, rhizomes, old crowns. If you look at it, plants produce thatch, it looks a bit like a sponge. Really thatch is a concern, Doug, with Kentucky bluegrass and creeping red fescue. Ryegrasses, tall fescue, they don't produce hardly any thatch.

That is really a term. When you hear people talk about thatch, I guarantee you they're talking about a creeping red fescue lawn or a Kentucky bluegrass lawn because there are two species that produce rhizomes that can produce a lot of this thatch. Thatch, it can do some good. If you've ever watched any professional sports played on natural grass, maybe north of I-70, that's being played on Kentucky bluegrass. Kentucky bluegrass produces thatch and that's what's providing cushioning and sod strength and footing.

If you would do that same thing to a ryegrass field, they will totally beat it up because they're right there footing on the surface versus footing into this thatch mat. Then oppositely though, if that thatch layer starts to become too thick, and because it is just like a sponge, what do sponges do? They hold lots of water. It's great habitat for insects to live in, diseases, and too much thatch can really start to degrade the turf.

It's striking that happy medium where we want a little bit, but if you're someone that over irrigates, over fertilizes, you're going to have potentially an over-accumulation of thatch, which then you have to come in and dethatch the lawn.

Doug: Okay. Dethatching, that sharp hand dethatching rake is a real pain.

Zane: Yes, depending on how much you have to do, that would not be the tool of choice. Again, I only see these two places, this thatch problem. I see it a lot in these older fine fescue yards that have a lot of creeping red fescue because the fine fescue species, these are low-input species. They don't need nearly the amount of nutrients that a bluegrass lawn does. In fact, they probably need about a third of the amount of nutrients that a Kentucky bluegrass yard does.

That's one lawn that I see has a lot of thatch production, and then the Kentucky bluegrass. If you're going to do your whole yard, I would recommend going to your local rental store and rent a dethatcher. That's going to be usually a self-propelled machine. Some of them are pushed, but they pull themselves through the yard, but they have a shaft that has either fixed-mounted blades, or they can have little metal fingers that get down into the yard. I personally like the ones that have the fixed blades that can cut through that. You'll see it as push them across the yard, they're going to pull up a lot of that thatch and debris, and then you're going to have to manage all that. That's the most challenging part of it, is raking up all that thatch stems that it brings to the soil surface. If you do that process, that's a great time to come in and oversee because there's not much that makes a better seedbed.

Doug: Tell me a little bit about what you get out of being the turf guy, answering all these questions, and helping people with their lawn.

Zane: Yes, I'm blessed to love what I do. I think a lot of that is, turf grass is an important part of our landscape. I think sometimes people like to point fingers at it of being a wasteful resource, but there are not any other plants that can do what turf grass does. The ability to tolerate mowing and traffic and you look at properties and you think about green space that people can use, it's got turf in it. It's a place that allows recreation to happen.

A lot of my memories as a childhood were made in turf areas. I think they're just really important outdoor spaces. I appreciate what it does as a plant, and then I appreciate the people that are passionate about it, people that are proud of their property or want to take care of it and make it as good as it can be. I really enjoy trying to help those individuals. Anything in horticulture, there's plenty of pests out there. It's job security for all of us, Doug, that these insects and weeds and diseases and abiotic stresses, they find a way.

You have individuals who are passionate about their plants. It's really fun to get in there and help them make them better or fix the problem. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to people, this has been a problem for years and you fixed it. They're just genuinely grateful for your help. I like helping people and I love being outdoors and I love turf grass. For me, it's the ultimate job and I can't believe I get paid to come to work.

Doug: All right, Zane, great stuff as always. Wonderful to talk to you. We will revisit the turf and lawns next year when we get going again and see what we can do in the spring. Definitely, another fall one for sure. Thanks again for your time, that was fun.

Zane: Yes, thanks, Doug. Good to talk to you.

Doug: We sure covered a lot of ground in that two-parter. If you missed the first episode, take a listen, I think you'll enjoy it. Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I am your host, Doug Oster. Do me a big favor, subscribe to the podcast so you'll never miss one of these great shows. If you've got an idea for a show or maybe a comment, I'd love to hear from you. Send me an email to podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S at D-A-V-E-Y dot com. As always, we like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast. Trees are the answer.

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