Lowcountry Law Care

This is not an advertisement for a lawn care company.

It is a prescription for a great lawn in the Lowcountry. If you take a walk through your neighborhood, it is evident who used pre-emergent in the fall. The lawns that are still brown used a pre-emerge. Those lawns that are green probably did not. It isn’t that the grass is greening up already. It’s that the weeds are coming up, especially Poa Anna.

Now is the time to put down the spring dose of pre-emergent. The official way to tell is just before the soil temperature reaches 50 degrees. The way most of us know when to put down the pre-emerge is when the forsythia starts to bloom. If we go by the calendar – Valentine’s Day is time to give your lawn some love. This year, some cool nights extended the window a little, and you still have some time. In early March, we are still at 49 degrees soil temperature at my house; in North Mount Pleasant.

What do I use?

          
I have always used Halts from Scotts. I haven’t been able to find it the past couple of seasons and have been using WeedEx instead. Spectracide has a crabgrass preventer as well. It is called CrabEx and I would guess it works as well. Corn gluten is an organic/natural product that also prevents germination. The timing is more important and it doesn’t last as long.

Pre emergents do not generally kill weeds that have already germinated. They prevent germination. I don’t know how they work. That would be a subject for another writer.

I avoid any product that includes fertilizer or nitrogen. It is too early to fertilize southern lawns, and most of us have centipede, at least in the sunny part of the lawn. Centipede is very susceptible to nitrogen kill. When you use fertilizer on centipede lawns, I like one that starts with 15; like a 15-0-15. If you use a product that has a higher first number, you can apply it at half the recommended rate. I wait until the grass is green to feed it with fertilizer. That allows it to wake up on its own rather than shocking it awake.

What else?

As long as I have the spreader out and I am doing yard work, I make another pass with some insecticide. This season I used SpectricideTriazicide. I mix it up every season. Bayer and Ortho also make insecticides that are easy to find at any home store.  

I need to water everything in. While I have the hose out, I spray any weeds that made it through the fall dose of pre-emerge with a liquid weed killer. Spectracide Weed Stop or Ortho Weed Be Gone are the products I usually use.

A common hard-to-kill, weedy grass that is popping up on many lawns is Poa Annua. The only product I know that kills it without killing the lawn is Image. It needs to be attacked early, and it takes a couple of weeks. If you have waited until now, It could take two doses, two weeks apart. I seem to have poa annua along the area where the yard hits the street every year, even though I use a pre-emerge.

Call me today to find your perfect lawn!