Winter Lawn Care

Don't let cooler weather deter you from getting into the garden. While it might be cold outside, work in the garden will give you a warm glow in both the body and mind. Here are some things you can do during winter to help your lawn.

Lawn Solutions Oxafert Herbicide and fertilisers is a pre-emergent herbicide for control of many annual kinds of grass and broad-leaf weed in warm-season turf. They way Oxafert works is to target weed seeds before they take hold by forming a barrier on the soil that affects the germination of any new seedlings. Oxafert will give your lawn protection for up to 3 months from winter weeds.

ColourGuard PLUS is a special blend of micronutrients and natural grass pigment formulated to instantly enhance the colour of your lawn. ColourGuard PLUS can be used at any time of the year to improve your lawns overall appearance.

If you have an invasion of winter grass you will definitely want to do something about it before they germinate. If you allow winter grass to drop seeds, next winter they will be back, twice as bad as the previous year. Best practise is to treat them as soon as they appear.

Winter weed can easily be removed by hand as it does not have particularly deep roots. If you prefer to spray you will need to use winter grass killer as a general-purpose herbicide won’t be effective. Amgrow winter grass killer is safe to use on Buffalo lawns including Sir Walter DNA Certified and couch grasses but should be avoided on Kikuyu lawns.

So winter has come to an end, is your lawn looking a bit worse for wear!! After your warm-season grass such as Sir Walter DNA Certified Buffalo, Eureka Kikuyu and TifTuf come out of dormancy they may have suffered from what is commonly known as winter die-back or winter stress.

A simple fertilisation plan will get your lawn into high growth and self-repair.

We recommend:

1. Apply Lawn Solutions fertiliser once a month until your grass has repaired.
2. You can also apply liquid fertiliser. With the first lawn solution fertiliser application, we recommend Lawn Rescue as it has a good boat of nitrogen to encourage growth.
3. Now make sure you maintain consistent mowing while your lawn is repairing to prevent scalping and Water regularly.

There are two different families of lawn, you have warm-season grasses and you have cool-season grasses and they grow at different temperatures.

Warm-season varieties are Sir Walter DNA Certified, Eureka Kikuyu, Sir Grange and TifTuf Bermuda they all slow down over the cooler months.

What is happening here is called winter dormancy. Different grasses by nature of their composition will go into different levels of dormancy depending on the temperature. This allows the grass to minimise metabolic activity which helps the plant to conserve energy. Your soil at some stage will drop below 14 degrees in Victoria. Warm-season grasses will start to slow down and go into a certain level of dormancy. This will most likely occur mid-May. This is how the grass protects itself from the harsh winter conditions.

In Australia, we have a limited true cool-season compared to other countries. This is the reason why warm-season grasses are much more common than cool-season varieties like Fescue and Rye.

Here in our North East Region Albury Wodonga and surrounds we get very hot long summers and pretty cold winters, so it is important to have a good lawn care plan all year round. During the dormancy your lawn may change colour and go lighter, this is caused by low temperatures and frost.

Try not to walk on your lawn whenever there is a frost on the lawn. Walking on a frosty lawn can break the leaf and cause more damage.

On Frosty mornings you can give your lawn a light water before the sun comes up. This will stop the sun reflecting through the frost and burning the grass. The health of your lawn is one of the most important factors in ensuring your turf can do better through the cooler months. Using our lawn fertiliser with its increased iron before winter ( we recommend around easter ) is usually a good time to do this and will help strengthen your lawn for whats ahead.

If your warm-season grass does happen to lose its appearance more than you like, don't panic we have it covered with our very impressive product ColourGuard a totally organic pigment easy to apply and has a nutrient additive to help.