How do you care for your lawn during the summer? Care instructions for a summer lawn. The first thing you want to do is change your mowing habits. You want to mow as many times in the winter and cut it...
The first thing you want to do is change your mowing habits. You want to mow as many times in the winter and cut it a little bit shorter because it looks good, but you want to cut the grass a little bit higher in the summer time. For St. Augustine, typically you will cut it at three inches tall and in the summer you will raise your deck to three and half inches. Make sure you have a sharp blade on your lawnmower- it's pretty important in the summer time especially when it gets hot. When you have a real clean-cut on the grass blade, it does not lose as much water and it does not stress as bad, so that's pretty important. You don't want to take anymore than a quarter inch or an eighth of an inch off your grass per mowing. If you let your grass get really tall, more than half an inch or so, you will have to probably cut it twice because you don't want to take too much off at one time. You may have to mow more frequently just to maintain mowing at the eighth inch intervals, which means you may have to mow every seven days, which is pretty typical for a summer lawn.
You'll also want to fertilize, depending on what type of grass you have. St. Augustine is a pretty heavy feeder, so you want to fertilize that with about 2 lbs of nitrogen. If you fertilize in the spring, say March or April of 2005, you don't want to fertilize again in June. I would go back and fertilize again around September, but in September I would use the lower nitrogen fertilizer. You can also use iron if you want a quick green for your lawn, but in order for iron to work, there has to be a couple of things that are in your favor. The first thing is the pH level. Just because the nutrient is there in the ground, if the pH is not right, then the plant is not going to take up the nutrient. So you want your pH anywhere between 5.0 up to 6.5. Also with the iron, you're going to have to water a lot to activate it. So you need some real long deep water to wake the iron, but once it activates it, you will definitely see a difference in the grass.
