After our herky-jerky spring with early heat and late frost, it was easy to miss just how dry it has been, and our lawns are starting to dry out and struggle.
The first step in helping your lawn survive dry summer weather is to let your lawn get taller…as tall as your lawn mower will adjust… maybe 4” to 5”. If you mow your lawn very short as we have been all spring (which was OK at that time), the sun will heat the soil to temperatures that will permanently kill the roots of your grass. Letting the lawn grow taller allows the blades of grass to shade the soil preventing soil temperatures from getting high enough to cause permanent damage to the roots. You may like the look of a shorter lawn, but if the soil temperature goes above 85° to 90° for three consecutive days, the root system dies. Once that happens, you’re looking at a lot of grass seed and a lot of watering in late summer and early fall as you try to replace a lawn that could’ve been saved had you allowed the grass to get taller during dry summer weather
Traditional wisdom tells us that, for a lawn to remain healthy, it needs an inch of water a week. What you need to know, though, is that the lawn needs that inch of water all at once to get any real benefit from it. This means that you should water your lawn heavily then not at all for a week. With a limited amount of water available to most of us, we have the tendency to try and move the sprinkler around the yard to make sure that we get the whole lawn watered at one time without any regard to whether it is getting enough water for more than temporary relief. I’d like to suggest a different way. If you have watering restrictions that only allow you to water every other day for two hours, let your lawn sprinkler soak one area for the full two hours. When your next watering opportunity arrives, move the lawn sprinkler to the next section and soak it with at least an inch of water.
Folks with underground sprinkling systems need to follow the same advice. These systems can be programmed to water different zones at different times. Unfortunately, most folks set them up to water each zone for ten or twenty minutes every day. Instead, set them up to soak one zone each day with an inch of water then do a different zone the next day. The reason for all this is to take the best advantage of the limited water we have. By putting an inch of water on the lawn, you’ll be soaking the soil to a depth of 6”. Water at this depth in the soil will not evaporate quickly, and it’s where the roots of the grass are located so it can be absorbed. Quickly spraying the lawn might perk it up briefly but most of that moisture is lost to evaporation and can never penetrate deep into the soil to get to the roots.
At this point folks will ask me, “How long do I need to leave the sprinkler on to put on an inch of water?” Since we all have different lawn sprinklers and water pressure, I can’t answer that question. This is something we must all determine on our own. You can get a rain gauge and leave it out there until it has an inch of water in it. There’s no need to buy a rain gauge though (but they are handy). You simply need to take a small, empty tuna fish can and place it in the area you’re watering and don’t shut it off until it is full. Make a mental note of how long it took, and you’ll always know how long your setup takes to put out an inch of water. That’s it. Water deeply, then take a break for a week.
Thanks for the read!
