With the sun out and shining brighter than it ever has in the last few months, it’s the perfect time to start taking care of your lawn for the summer.

To help you get the best outcome possible for your property, here is a list of important steps to make sure your lawn is beautiful and healthy for the hottest time of year, with insight from a local expert.

According to MountainView Turf Vice-President Lindsay Hamilton, the first thing to do when preparing your lawn for the summer is giving it a light raking to remove any brown or dormant grass from the surface.

Beneficial for air circulation in the ground, it allows water and nutrients to seep into the soil and give the grass the colour everyone loves to see, Hamilton said

“Everybody’s anxious to see a little bit of green after a very long winter this year,” she said. “And this is the best way to promote the most growth and best colour.”

For step number two, once the soil reaches an adequate temperature of above 10 degrees Celsius, add a light spring formula fertilizer with high nitrogen to feed the roots of the grass and the soil.

“It kind of gives it a little jumpstart,” she said. “It kind of gets it out of dormancy.”

According to Hamilton, fertilizers are important to the health of your turf and essential for preventing weeds such as dandelions from growing in your yard.

Another important step is looking for bare areas on your lawn and verifying which parts of the soil need extra application of seeding or topsoil.

“The faster you put seeds in those areas, the less you start to get weeds,” she said.

When it comes to choosing the right seed, you can’t go wrong with Kentucky Bluegrass due to its high level of durability making it resistant to weeds, bugs and outdoor activity, according to Hamilton.

“It’s good against high traffic,” she said. “So, if you’ve got kids, animals or areas where there’s a path where people are walking often, it’s very strong for those as well as it doesn’t die in the winter.”

Another important thing to look out for is compaction of your soil, which can be dealt with by aerating your lawn by punching little holes in the ground. If your soil feels like a sponge when you’re walking on it that means you’ve got compaction, which prevents water and nutrients from getting to the roots, Hamilton said.

“You can rent small aerator machines from most hardware stores,” she said.

Lastly, when you start mowing this summer remember to only cut off a third of the leaf blades, as cutting off more tends to stress out the grass which causes it to produce more carbohydrates instead of root growth, Hamilton said.

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