How do you care for your lawn in winter? Winterizing your lawn is a waste of fertilizer since grass is dormant in the winter. To give your lawn the best care, fertilize your in the fall, but not the winter.
When asked about caring for lawns in the winter, Merrideth Jiles, who is the garden center manager at The Great Outdoors Nursery and Landscaping Center in Austin, Texas, says, "Often, in particular in the south, you hear about 'winterizing' your lawn. This is the idea that your lawn needs something to make it through the winter. Well, for the most part, grasses go dormant in the winter and they are basically not growing at all. So there is no need to fertilize. A fertilizer should augment the natural growth of a plant. It shouldn't force the plant to do anything. If you have a plant that is naturally going dormant, you should not try to force it to do anything and there is no reason to feed it. It's basically just a waste of fertilizer in my opinion."
Jiles adds, "What you should do instead, is feed your lawn in the early fall. Particularly in warmer climates, a lawn gets pretty stressed out in the summer because it is so hot and so dry and you can actually take advantage of this cooler period in the fall to re-grow some nice green grass and get it more lush or fill in some spots might have died in the summer, before it goes dormant for the winter. So I think it's a great idea to fertilize the lawn in the fall, but winterizing is kind of a faulty concept. That's probably why most good garden centers nowadays don't sell a winterizer."
A more natural type of winter protection comes in the form of evergreen boughs that are used to cover a newly established lawn or ground cover such as small plants and/or shrubs. If attempted, the branches should not be put on the lawn or other plants until the ground is frozen and not removed before it's completely thawed. This is done essentially to keep the ground from thawing too soon and then re-freezing as it normally does during a mild winter, causing damage to the grass or groundcover. It is thought to insulate the ground, keeping it at a somewhat steady temperature.
If you take the precautions of fertilizing when you should, properly watering and mowing within reason, your lawn should be strong enough to survive winter and thrive during its growing season. There are steps that you can take in the spring to revitalize a lawn that has been weakened during a particularly harsh winter, in terms of frost, being unseasonably warm or a mixture of both. With a frozen ground, the nutrients that fertilizer is supposed to deliver will do no good. It's sort of like trying to tempt a bear out of hibernation by placing a load of fresh meat outside of his cave. Even if you succeed in waking him up, all that you will have accomplished is having one very confused bear. The types of grass that make up the lawns in colder climates are meant to be dormant during the winter. Like the bear, who may shed a few pounds and be groggy come spring, your lawn will also come back quickly with "food", water and warm sunshine; if it was "well-fed" before falling asleep.
