Your lawn might not be as excited about summer as you are.
You’re rafting down rivers, chasing the ice cream truck and mixing margaritas on the patio. Meanwhile, your grass is thirsty in the searing hot sun, battling hungry insects and trying not to get a gross fungus.
Summer is tough on grass.
Jump to Section:
- First, Why Is My Grass Turning Brown in Summer?
- How to Tell a Dormant Lawn from a Dead Lawn in Summer
- Hot-Weather Lawn Care: Don’t Water Every Day
- Fertilizing, Times Three, to Keep Your Lawn Green in Summer
- Don’t Let Weeds Take Over
- Mow Tall to Keep Your Lawn Green in Summer
- Should You Leave Clippings on Your Lawn in Summer?
- Keep Your Mower Blades Sharp
- Summer Lawn Care: Watch for Fungus
- Keep An Eye Out For Bugs
- Trusting Summer Lawn Care to Professionals
How should you manage lawn care in the summer? Water adequately, but avoid daily watering. Fertilize consistently during the summer months. Prevent weeds from overtaking your lawn. Mow at a higher setting. Leave grass clippings after mowing — they provide a valuable nutritional boost for your lawn.
Keep reading for helpful summer lawn care tips.
First, Why Is My Grass Turning Brown in Summer?
Let’s answer your most pressing summer lawn care question first.
Everybody gets frustrated when they feel like they’re doing everything right, but their grass starts turning brown in the summer heat.
What’s up with that?
Your lawn’s just trying to survive. Grasses, especially the cool-season varieties such as Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass, often go dormant in the summer. They slow their growth and turn brown to conserve water and energy during periods of drought and extreme heat.
When you notice your lawn turning brown, it’s stressed.
When a lawn is deprived of sufficient water, it stops growing and begins to turn brown.
The dreaded combination of high temperatures and low humidity causes moisture to evaporate from your lawn’s leaf blades. That depletes its water reserves, causing the grass to go dormant.
It’s a way for your lawn to conserve its resources, allowing it to survive the challenging conditions.
It shuts down its growth, stores energy in its roots, and waits for better conditions to resume growing again.
Don’t panic — dormant grass isn’t dead. It will usually recover when the weather cools and it receives more water.
How can you tell if your grass is dormant and not dead? That’s a great way to kick off summer lawn care:
1. How to Tell a Dormant Lawn from a Dead Lawn in Summer
Grab hold of a few clumps of grass and tug. Does it pull right up, with no root system holding it in? It’s probably dead. But dormant grass will still have a solid root system and resist your tug.
Here’s a bonus tip: When a lawn is brown, people seem to think it’s OK to walk all over it. It looks dead, right, so what’s the harm?
However, excessive foot traffic on your lawn when it’s dormant can harm it. Use the sidewalks and driveway, and give your lawn a break.
2. Hot-Weather Lawn Care: Don’t Water Every Day
How often do you need to water your lawn in summer? Not as often as you think. Not every day.
It’s tempting, we know. The Idaho sun is beating down, and you swear you hear your precious lawn gasping, “water, waterrrrrrr!”
If you water every day, you encourage the growth of shallow, needy roots. The roots don’t have to go deep for water - they can just hang out at the surface and get the water they need.
You want to water less often, but more deeply, so the roots will grow deeper and healthier, helping to keep your lawn green in the summer.
Early morning is the best time to water, when it’s still cool, so all that valuable water won’t evaporate in the hot sun.
3. Fertilizing, Times Three, to Keep Your Lawn Green in Summer
Summer makes your lawn hungry.
Many homeowners neglect their lawn’s fertilizer needs, applying it only once or twice a year.
What should you put on your grass in summer?
Your hungry Idaho lawn needs three fertilizer treatments during the growing season to stay green and healthy during all those backyard barbecues and lazy summer weekends on the patio.
What’s the best timing? Plan on mid-May, around the end of June, and in early to mid-August. Staying on top of fertilizer is one of the most important summer lawn care tips.
The right fertilizer blend can provide your lawn with the precise mix of quick-release and slow-release nutrients it needs, delivering both immediate and long-term results to keep your lawn green and healthy.
For your summer lawn care fertilizing schedule, use 25 percent quick-release and 75 percent slow-release fertilizer to keep your lawn green in summer, but avoid big growth spikes so you’re not constantly mowing.
4. Don’t Let Weeds Take Over
Weeds love summer, when you’re so distracted by vacation, frosty drinks on the patio, and which flip-flops to wear, they think you might not notice them.
Show them who’s boss and keep your lawn healthy in the summer heat, when weeds thrive.
Your summer lawn care schedule requires a multi-step approach, starting with pre-emergent weed control in spring to prevent weeds from growing.
This includes applying broadleaf treatments aimed at dandelions and clover, along with spot treatments for any unwelcome intruders that may appear.
5. Mow Tall to Keep Your Lawn Green in Summer
This is an easy one, but among the top summer lawn care tips.
Cutting your grass too short stresses the grass, especially in the heat of summer, and makes it more susceptible to damage from insects and disease.
Never cut off more than a third of the grass blade at any one time.
6. Should You Leave Clippings on Your Lawn in Summer?
When you mow, those grass clippings have to go somewhere. Should you leave them on the lawn? Or bag them?
Leaving the clippings on the lawn, where they decompose over time, is called mulching. And here in Idaho, in the summer, it’s your best plan.
Lawns love to eat, and grass clippings contain the same beneficial nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium as fertilizer. As those clippings break down, they add valuable nutrients to the soil.
But this strategy only works well if you mow fairly often, and the clippings are pretty short.
If you’re an infrequent mower, and your clippings are long, it’s best to bag them. Large clumps of grass left sitting on your lawn can rot, killing the live grass underneath. And avoid mowing when the grass is wet. Wet grass tends to clump more easily.
Another exception: if you see signs of lawn disease, bag your clippings — don't mulch them. You don't want the lawn fungus to spread.
But your mulching plan should change with the seasons. In Idaho, mulching lawn clippings is effective during the hottest summer months.
But in other seasons, we don’t have the high temperatures and humidity needed to break down the grass clippings between mowings.
Those lingering grass clippings can be a big pain.
When grass clippings remain on your lawn, unable to break down, a thick layer of dead grass, called thatch, builds up and blocks the flow of essential oxygen and nutrients to your lawn. Your grass will suffer, getting thin and patchy.
The loose grass clippings also tend to stick to your shoes or bare feet, staining your kids’ clothes and getting tracked into the house.
In spring and fall, bagging those clippings keeps everything neater.
7. Keep Your Mower Blades Sharp
A dull mower blade shreds the grass instead of cutting it cleanly.
This causes the tips of the grass to turn brown and die. The jagged edges also invite pests and disease.
A sharp blade makes a nice, clean cut, which helps the grass to heal faster. That helps keep your grass green in summer.
8. Summer Lawn Care: Watch for Fungus
The humidity of summer makes your lawn more susceptible to fungus. So keep an eye out for it - it can strike fast.
You can wake up on a warm morning, look out at your lawn, and see entire areas have turned yellow or brown.
Lawns damaged by fungus will often have a brown, dead spot where the grass has died, but a lighter, yellowish-brown ring around it where the fungus is spreading.
The type of disease will determine the course of treatment.
Applying fungicides can help treat many lawn diseases. Some go away on their own. A professional lawn care technician can help with diagnosis and proper treatment.
9. Keep An Eye Out For Bugs
Pesky lawn pests love summer, and your tender, green lawn is a welcoming buffet for bugs.
Before you know it, they’ll devour it, right down to the roots.
The main villains: Grubs. Billbugs. Sod webworms.
There is no single treatment for all summer lawn pests, as each has a distinct life cycle.
Grubs and billbugs are best controlled by systemic products — insecticides that are absorbed by the grass. When lawn insects eat the grass blades or roots, they die.
Others, like sod webworms, need a contact insecticide to be applied because they’re top feeders rather than feeding on your lawn’s roots.
Keep an eye out for these destructive little beasts before they destroy your lawn.
Need Help With Summer Lawn Care? Trust Lawn Buddies
That’s a lot of important summer lawn care tips to keep in mind. How are you supposed to perfect your mango margaritas if you’re tending to your lawn all summer?
Why not leave it to us? Then you can spend summer doing fun stuff, like not worrying about your lawn.
Choose a lawn care and landscaping service in Boise and Idaho Falls that bundles your yard’s most-needed treatments into one convenient, no-fuss, six-visit plan.
We've got everything your lawn needs to grow healthy and green, including weed control and grub control that’s perfectly timed throughout the year.
Got a few minutes? That’s all you need to get started. Just fill out a brief form, call us at (208) 656-9131 or read more about our services. Then, you can kick back and relax in your healthy, thriving yard.
