It’s comforting to think of your lawn all tucked in for the winter under a cozy blanket of snow.
Meanwhile, it can actually be rough out there. Gross snow mold. Sheets of ice that can suffocate your grass. Damage from ice melt products.
Jump to Section
- First, Snow Mold in Lawns: What Is It?
- What Are the Best Lawn Care Tasks to Do Before Winter?
- Break Up Big Piles of Snow
- Winter Lawn Care: Avoid Salt Damage
- How a Lawn Care Program Can Help Prevent Winter Lawn Issues
- How Do You Prevent Snow Damage in Grass? Trust Lawn Buddies
How do you prepare a lawn for winter? Feed it one last time. Clear it of debris. Aerate to help it breathe. Mow it shorter for your final mow of the season. Read the instructions on any ice melt products so you know exactly how much to apply without damaging your lawn.
Dillon Beardall, a manager at Lawn Buddies, shares tips and strategies to prevent winter lawn diseases and damage.
Let’s learn more about winter lawn issues.
First, Snow Mold in Lawns: What Is It?Snow mold sounds alarming, but it’s a fairly common cold-weather lawn disease in Idaho and usually not a significant threat to your lawn.
It thrives in damp, cool conditions underneath that blanket of fluffy snow. And, in warmer winters, you won't see this one appear. It needs persistent snow to prevent airflow and sunshine from reaching your lawn.
Snow mold usually appears as tan or bleached grass patches with a gray or pink hue. Your grass will look matted, brittle or straw-like. Snow mold patches can grow up to 3 feet wide.
“We do get a bit of snow mold,” Beardall says. “It depends on how long the snow sticks around.”
The longer your lawn is covered with snow, the greater the chance of snow mold developing. It often forms beneath big piles of snow that are slow to melt.
When your bread or cheese gets moldy, you get grossed out and throw it away. How are you supposed to react to snow mold in lawns?
Don’t stress too much about it, Beardall says. Any damage to your lawn isn’t usually severe.
When the snow melts, the snow mold dies. But as it sits on top of your grass, looking gross, it’s also blocking essential sunlight from reaching your lawn. That keeps it from producing chlorophyll, which it needs to green up.
What causes snow mold in lawns? A combination of cold temperature and moisture. It also likes long grass blades. The longer the grass, the more likely it is to be matted and retain moisture. Then, boom, snow mold.
How do you prevent snow damage in grass? Turns out the same lawn care strategies you can use to help prevent snow mold are great for your lawn in general as we head into winter.
What Are the Best Lawn Care Tasks to Do Before Winter?
A few key tasks before the snow flies will not only help prevent snow mold damage, but keep your lawn healthy through the winter and ready to emerge robust and green in the spring.
How do you prepare a lawn for winter? Check out these tips:
Clean Up Debris
Rake or mulch your leaves, pick up fallen branches and gather up
other lawn debris.
It's not just about looking good. That mess can smother your grass, trap moisture or encourage pests or mold.
Winter Lawn Care: Aerate Your Lawn
We’ve said it before, but now is a great time to repeat it: Aerating is excellent for your lawn.
Aeration uses a machine to pull tiny soil cores from your lawn. This loosens the dense, compacted soil that comes from a season of foot traffic and lawn mowing.
Aerating allows air, water, and nutrients to reach the roots more effectively. Fall is the perfect time for this beneficial treatment.
“A lot of our customers get fall aeration,” Beardall says, “which helps the lawn create some air flow.”
Aerating breaks up thatch, too, and snow mold loves thatch. Thatch is that layer of dead grass and stems between your grass blades and the soil.
Aeration removes plugs from the thatch, helping it decompose and allowing oxygen, nutrients, and moisture to reach the roots. That makes it less likely that snow mold will creep in and take hold.
Feed Your Lawn One Last Time
How do you prepare a lawn for winter? Fertilize in fall with a slow-release blend to provide nutrients that your grass roots will absorb and store for the winter, boosting early spring growth.
Winterizer is one term for this final fertilizing of the season. Here at Lawn Buddies, we don’t refer to it specifically as “winterizer,” but we definitely recommend a final fertilizer boost for your lawn as part of your winter lawn care.
Our final fall fertilizer of the year includes more potassium than the other applications, Beardall says. That extra boost feeds your lawn’s roots, for a lawn that emerges green and healthy in the spring.
Fertilizing your lawn in the fall is important for many reasons, but one of the benefits is that the last feeding before winter can help strengthen your lawn so it better withstands diseases like snow mold.
But wait until after your lawn has gone dormant. If you fertilize while your lawn is still growing, the feeding will encourage new growth, especially if you use a high-nitrogen fertilizer. And remember, snow mold loves long grass.
Mow Low — But Just This Once
Beardall is the first guy to tell you to mow your grass tall for the best lawn health. Most of the year, he gives that advice. Taller grass is healthier. Mowing tall helps your grass develop a deeper root system, which leads to a fuller, greener lawn.
But for the final mowing of the season, he says, lower the mower blade to about 2 inches for shorter grass to help reduce the risk of lawn diseases like snow mold.
Also, remove the grass clippings — even if you usually leave them to decompose. Clippings encourage moisture and damp conditions that favor snow mold.
Water Consistently
Continue watering your lawn lightly through fall as part of your pre-winter lawn care to help it through the winter.
Then, don’t forget to blow out and shut down your irrigation system for the winter so the components don’t freeze.
How’s Your Drainage?
Maybe you’re too busy looking for your shovel and ice scraper to ponder your yard drainage, but it matters.
Proper grading prevents water pooling, which can lead to ice sheets that suffocate your grass and encourage lawn diseases like snow mold.
Winter Lawn Care: Break Up Big Piles of Snow
Snow mold loves big mounds of snow that hang around and melt slowly, keeping your grass damp and cold and soggy. You can almost watch the mold forming.
Big piles of snow can take weeks to melt, giving snow mold plenty of time to take hold.
So, head outside with a shovel and break up those big piles of snow, spreading it around in a thinner layer so it melts faster. You’ll be like a snow mold superhero.
Winter Lawn Care: Avoid Salt Damage
While snow mold occurs naturally due to weather conditions, another winter threat to your lawn is man-made. Ice melt products can really damage your grass.
When your sidewalks and driveway are slick with ice, it’s tempting to go a little crazy with the ice melt, tossing extra on and assuming more is better, which will melt your ice faster.
More isn’t better. Always follow the recommended application rate for your specific ice melt product to help avoid lawn damage.
Also, don’t put ice melt on snow if there’s enough snow to shovel. When you shovel the snow and toss it onto the grass, that damaging ice melt will end up on your lawn.
If you hire a contractor to apply ice melt, make sure they use it responsibly. You don’t want to partner with a snow removal service that still uses straight rock salt as a de-icer. Ask them what they use.
Rock salt is terrible for the environment—including your lawn. It seeps into area waterways, creating a hostile environment for wildlife. It also damages surrounding landscaping, leaving unsightly brown patches of dead salt-damaged grass.
There are better, safer options.
Choose a commercial snow removal company that uses other key players for de-icing, including liquid magnesium chloride, treated rock salt, and brine — all significantly better for the environment.
How a Lawn Care Program Can Help Prevent Winter Lawn Issues
Your goal as you head into winter? A healthy lawn.
A well-fed and maintained lawn can stand up to any attack better than a weak, hungry and stressed one.
How do you prepare a lawn for winter? Keep your grass thick, lush, and healthy with an annual lawn care service maintenance program for strong, healthy roots.
Lawn diseases will occasionally pop up in Idaho lawns, “but we have good practices on properties that we maintain regularly that avoid it,” Beardall says. “They’re usually found on properties where homeowners are putting on too much water, not mowing properly or not practicing the best lawn care standards.”
How Do You Prevent Snow Damage in Grass? Trust Lawn Buddies
Winter isn’t always kind to your lawn, but you’ll give it a fighting chance with expert lawn care in Boise and Idaho Falls so it heads into winter strong and healthy.
If you want simple, hassle-free lawn care and landscaping services in Boise and Idaho Falls that offer quality core lawn care services for a healthy, impressive lawn, it doesn’t get easier than Lawn Buddies.
No stressing about which complicated combination of lawn care services will get you beautiful, dark green grass.
You don’t have time to fuss with all that. Give yourself a break.
Lean on one premium, six-visit lawn care program that includes everything your lawn needs to grow healthy and green.
Fertilizer, weed treatments, and grub control, all wrapped up in six visits, each perfectly timed throughout the season, so your grass is green and strong and resists weeds and lawn diseases like snow mold.
Got a few minutes? That’s all you need to get started. Just fill out the form on this page, call us at (208) 656-9131 or read more about our services. Then, you can kick back and relax in your healthy, thriving yard.
