Common Lawn Issues and How to Solve Them

There are three leading causes of lawn issues, diseases, weeds, and pests. These can cause significant problems if left untreated, but all have simple fixes if you know the best course of action. As essential lawn maintenance, you should be mowing, fertilizing, and watering regularly, as well as scarifying and aerating during the autumn as needed. If you have all of these in hand, you can begin to diagnose any further issues and take the relevant actions to solve them. If you need help maintaining your garden, make sure to check out lawn mowing pricing Brisbane for a reasonable contractor.

Pests

Both pets and wildlife found in nature can cause issues for your lawn, and while it’s beneficial to attract local creatures to your garden, some are less useful than others. Female dogs can be a problem if they can urinate on your regular and can cause brown patches. You can either train her to urinate somewhere other than the lawn, or will have to reseed the patches that become discolored regularly.

Worms

Earthworms are beneficial in flowerbeds and plots where you have vegetables growing, but can harm your grass if left unattended. A simple solution is to cover your lawn with peat annually, which will reduce the amount of earthworm activity, or using a fertilizer with ammonia or sulfate can also help.

Ants

Anthills will often appear over summer and can cause damage to your lawn’s roots. Before you mow your lawn, scatter any anthill with a sweeping brush to prevent the ants from continuing to spread.

Diseases

Red Thread

This will appear in the latter half of summer and look like patches of brown or red-tinged grass. To see if this is red thread or just underwatered grass, look for red growths around the grass. To avoid red thread, make sure to fertilize your lawn in the spring, and if you find your lawn is infected, you can use a fungicide to eliminate this disease.

Snow Mold

Like red thread, this is a fungal infection that appears in the late summer and autumn or after a significant amount of snow. It will look like small yellow grass patches with white mold around the edge, and can be treated with a fungicide from a local garden shop.

Fairy Rings

An easily identified infection, fairy rings are toadstools that form rings and aren’t a huge issue, but can cause bare patches of grass around the fungus. You can prevent fairy rings by ensuring that the soil is correctly prepared before laying any new turf and by regularly mowing and feeding your lawn. There’s no real cure for fairy rings, and if the issue gets out of hand, you’ll have to remove the turf and start again.

Weeds

There are several approaches to removing weeds from your lawn, with the main two being hand weeding and chemical weeding. The first is as simple as pulling out weeds by hand, pulling out the weed root and all where possible to stop any additional growth.