Brown lawn? Don't lose hope! - 13 WTHR Indianapolis

Given the drought conditions, many yards are looking pretty bad: brown and near dead. With Marion County's new watering ban taking effect Friday, area lawns could soon look worse yet.

We asked Steve Mayer, a horticulturalist with the Purdue Extension Office in Marion County, to take a look at three different lawns in one neighborhood, each in varying degrees of health. Could they be saved?

"Just because they're brown doesn't mean they're dead. They go into dormancy first," Mayer explained.

Taking a look at the first lawn, lush and green for the most part, Mayer said, "There's nothing wrong with this lawn in the heat of summer."

It had obviously been watered regularly and mowed tall, which Mayer said is important.

"When you mow tall, there's more leaf surface and that means the plant can produce more food via photosynthesis," he said.

Lawn number two looked like many lawns in central Indiana, mostly brown with patches of green here and there. It had probably been watered some, but not much.

Mayer noted, "There's some green grass in there, so it's not 100% dormant. The more green, the more hope."

Even without regular watering, he said, chances were good it would survive, provided it got some extra TLC come fall.

"If it goes long enough and dry enough there will be thinning of the grass and you may need to fertilize extra in the fall and over-seed," he said.

Lawn number three was completely brown, except around the flower bed, where Ginny Cushman-Wood had been watering. She admitted her turf wasn't looking so hot.

"I've not been watering the lawn because I thought there was a ban in Marion County," she said. (That ban becomes mandatory Friday.)

Running his fingers through the matted down grass, Mayer said, "It is very dry and there's going to be more damage if it's used a lot, carts going back and forth or heavy walking."

He said without digging it up and examining the root system, there's no way to tell for sure how much of the lawn will bounce back - not until we get some good soaking rains.

"That way we could tell with repeated rains whether it will come out of dormancy or not," he said.

Mayer insisted there's still hope for even the brownest of lawns.

"I've seen lawns the past two summers that haven't been watered at all and they weren't 100 percent dead. They did come back," he said.

Asked whether people should soak their lawns before Friday's mandatory ban takes effect, he said, "It's not going to green things up" or change things much.

"If it's really dormant, that's not going to be enough to bring it out of dormancy," he said, noting even with the worst-case scenario, "if you do a little work this fall to help it recover," [reseed and refertilize] you can still save a lot of your lawn.