Maintaining the lawn takes quite a bit of work, but it starts looking like you’ll see some good results when spring rolls around. The grass is growing strong, and you think you’ll have a full lawn.
Sometimes, all your efforts don’t pay off, and the lush greenery doesn’t happen. The summer heat kills what you’ve managed to grow, no matter how much water you add.
Luckily, cooler weather provides the perfect time for top lawn dressing. If you’re unfamiliar with the process, we’ll explain it below.
Read on to find out what lawn top dressing is, lawn top dressing benefits when to top dress your yard, and how to top-dress your lawn.
What Is Lawn Top Dressing?
When you top dress a lawn, you’re spreading a layer of material over it to promote grass growth. This layer is often compost or sand.
One thing to remember when top-dressing your lawn is too much sand or compost can suffocate the budding grass beneath and inhibit growth. The point is to provide an area where seeds will germinate.
You can hire someone to top-dress your lawn if you don’t feel you have the ability or time to do so. RDS Lawn Care offers top lawn dressing and various other services to homeowners.
Benefits of Top Dressing Lawns
As you’d expect from a practice made to grow your grass, there are a lot of benefits to top-dressing your lawn. One top dressing benefit is that it smoothes uneven patches in your yard.
Top-dressing helps increase the nutrients in your soil and reduces thatching in your yard. Thatch is when living and dead materials tangle between the growing grass and soil. Thatch can reduce air and water movement to roots.
When Is the Best Time to Top-Dress?
Don’t wait to top-dress your lawn when you see brown patches. The best time to top-dress is when the grass is actively growing. What time of year you should top-dress depends on the kind of grass.
Cool-weather grass should be top-dressed during the late summer or early fall. Your warm-weather grasses need top-dressing in the early summer.
How to Top-Dress Your Lawn
The first thing you should do when top-dressing your lawn is to have the soil tested. You’ll find out if the pH levels need adjusting or if there are nutrient deficiencies.
After testing the soil, kill any weeds. Ideally, you’ll use an herbicide that gets rid of weeds without damaging the grass.
The third thing you need to do is dig out clumping grasses, like orchardgrass or crabgrass, with an edging shovel. Herbicides may not rid you of these weeds.
Edging shovels help dig precise holes around weeds and cut through their roots.
Purchase quality compost and place it in small piles around your lawn. Rake the piles out no thicker than 1/4 inches. You should be able to see grass once you’ve laid the compost.
The next to last step is to add a starter fertilizer with a high phosphorus content to help the roots grow.
Finally, seed the ground twice in opposite directions. Once you’ve laid the seeds, you can set up sprinklers for irrigation.
Trying to Top-Dress Your Lawn?
Lawn top dressing provides a layer for grass seeds to germinate and help your grass grow. Two top-dressing benefits are that it helps smooth rough patches in your yard and get rid of thatch.
An important part of how to top-dress your lawn is making sure you purchase a starter fertilizer, as phosphorus will help encourage root growth.
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