INDIANAPOLIS — If you want a beautiful, green and lush lawn next spring, Pat Sullivan from Sullivan Hardware and Garden gave us a to-do list Sunday morning on 13Sunrise.
First, because your grass needs good soil to grow at its best, you need to make sure your ground allows grass roots to thrive.
Running a core aerator across your lawn in the fall loosens the soil and promotes more growth. An aerator, which is a tool many lawn services use and is usually available for homeowners to rent from equipment shops, pulls plugs of soil from several inches deep in the ground and provides a better environment for fertilizers, water and seeds to thrive in the holes left from the plugs. The best time to aerate is after a rain when the soil is moist and allows the aerator to penetrate deeper into to the ground.
Treating your soil will also help. Pat recommends a product called Love Your Soil that works to loosen and break down compacted dirt to allow for better root growth.
Pat also recommends putting down fall fertilizer in both September and November, just before your grass goes dormant for the winter.
Using a weed-and-feed product saves steps here, but applying weed killer to an entire lawn where only a few weeds are present can seem wasteful. So, Pat prefers to use a spray bottle of weed killer to spot treat weeds only where needed. Then, set the wheel height on your lawn mower to allow grass to grow taller and shade out new weeds to discourage their growth.
Watch Pat's full Sunday segment in the video player.