Lawns Tips for lawn maintenance - Continued

For the best over all results in testing your soil, test it in six or seven different areas of your landscape. Fertilizing your lawn in the spring and again in the fall months is going to ensure that your lawn continues to look full and grow year after year. Applying fertilizer when it is not needed can also cause your grass to turn brown when you have too much of any one type of nutrient in the soil which is why the testing of the soil is important.

For areas of your lawn that look tramped down, where people often walk through the lawn, use a lawn fork, or an aerator and poke holes in the soil. Giving the grass looser soil, more air to the roots, and caring for these trampled areas, your path through the yard may not look as bad as it has in the past.

If you have bare spots in your lawn, adding a bit of new soil, mixed with fertilizer and grass seed in the spring and in the fall months, you can coax new grasses to grow in these hard areas. Sometimes the underlying problem is that there is a large rock under the soil that is collecting the heat from the sun and then in turn burning the grass that lives above this area. You can dig up the soil and pull out large rocks or old walkway stones if you have an area that is larger and will not grow grass at all.