The frying of the lawn

Lawns are taking a beating in summer’s dry heat. - Kate Ter Haar/Creative Commons

After a brutally hot and dry month, the green, green grass of home is looking more like the brown, brown Serengeti — dried and fried.

I dimly remember a lush sea of grass lapping at the garden beds and walkways back in June or thereabouts. But that was then, and this is now. Now the sod is thin and patchy, and wherever the grass has expired, nut sedge and crabgrass have moved in.

It’s not a pretty sight.

Relying on well water as I do makes it hard enough to irrigate the gardens, the containers and the newly planted shrubs. Like many people, I don’t ordinarily water the lawn. I merely pray for rain with every passing cold front — mostly in vain.

I tell myself that lawn grass is a cool weather crop, and that dormant doesn’t necessarily mean dead. Fall’s cooler temperatures and more abundant rain will green the lawn back up, surely. I would like to believe this fairy tale. By now I suspect that portions of my lawn are not just merely dead but really most sincerely dead, as they said of the Wicked Witch of the West.

There’s actually a simple test for deciding the issue. In an area of deadish lawn about one-foot square, vigorously brush the grass with your hand, breaking off and sweeping away all that straw-like stuff. If, after the dust settles, you can spot green tissue at the base of the grass plants, there’s reason to hope.

If you’ve got nothing but withered blades that pull right out of the soil, your grass is history and you might as well resign yourself to reseeding. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the window of opportunity for lawn repair is coming right up, extending roughly from late August to mid-October.

While you’re waiting for the weather to moderate, you might as well treat your ailing lawn as tenderly as possible. Don’t mow if the grass isn’t growing — you’ll just tear up the roots and revisit the Dust Bowl days. Don’t stress an already weakened lawn with pesticides, and don’t broadcast herbicides; spot treat weeds, and only if you feel you must.

Don’t bother with crabgrass treatments, either, since this tacky weed is an annual and will croak with the first touch of frost. Most crabgrass suppressors prevent seed germination and these should go down in early spring.

With care, your lawn can be restored. — Mildred Pierce/Flickr

If you spread such products now, they will prevent the germination of your grass seed and your lawn repair labors will be wasted.

When you do go seed shopping, you might want to investigate the new tall lawn fescues, some of them (like ‘Rebel’) bred here in New Jersey. These not only have a finer leaf structure that blends well with bluegrass, but also are impregnated with endophytes, a class of useful fungi that boost resistance to disease, insects and drought.

A soil test would be helpful to pinpoint what nutrients are missing and whether you need an application of lime. Now would be an excellent time to visit your county office of the Rutgers Cooperative Extension Service to pick up a soil test kit. For a small fee, you’ll know all you need to know about your soil’s fertility and tilth.

The experts always stress that you should work grass seed into the soil with a rake and not leave it lying on the surface to dry out. Watering lightly but faithfully every day it doesn’t rain is crucial. A mulch of some kind is also recommended to help conserve soil moisture — but I’m living proof of how good advice can lead you astray.

A few falls ago I had to repair big swaths of lawn dug up during a drainage installation episode. I scraped the bare spots with my little tiller, sowed the seed and raked it madly to get it down into the soil, just like they say you should. I tossed starter fertilizer around, and got with a regimen of watering beginning at the crack o’ dawn.

To conceal the seed from the birds and keep it from drying out, I bought a bale of straw from a local feed store (“Straw, not seedy hay,” I specified). They gave me rye straw, which is the dried stalks of annual rye, commonly used for livestock bedding.

I laid this lightly over my seeded areas — no scraping, no raking in, no nothing. I want you to know that virtually every seed head of that darn rye sprouted vigorously, and with conspicuously coarse-bladed leaves. Come spring, it grew three times faster than the normal grass, making me growl. The saving grace: It’s short-lived and hates to be mowed, so by midsummer it had virtually disappeared.

In fact, it disappeared just in time for the normal grass itself to start failing in the dry, hot weather. Is there a theme here? Is this the endless, endless lawn repair story? Or am I just experiencing what Yogi Berra would call “deja vu all over again?” There’s no justice. And no peace.

*Addendum: Salt hay (spartina) is much the better mulch if you can find it. It’s not weedy because its seeds never sprout.