Fall Lawn Care Tips for Your Minnesota Lawn

Oh, the joy of fall lawn maintenance. It’s that time of year when you regret planting all those trees in your yard so many years ago. With winter on our heels, we have to start preparing our yard for the cold months ahead and start planning ahead for next spring. We have put together some tips to help you with your fall lawn care journey.

Get The Leaves Off Your Grass

Fall leaves are beautiful to look at but if they stay on your lawn too long you could be looking at fungal problems. Raking is a fun family activity and is a great exercise as well. Leaves should be raked about once a week to ensure it does not smother your grass and cause other problems. Raking can also help loosen thatch which can lead to soil compaction.

Reuse Your Leaves

Rather than packing your leaves in bags and letting the city collect them, you could put those same leaves back to work in your yard. Leaves make the perfect addition to your compost pile because they are full of nutrients. 

Here’s a tip. Run over the leaves a few times with your lawnmower to shred them up into tiny pieces. You can either compost the shredded leaves or leave them there and rake them back into your yard as organic fertilizer. The smaller you can shred your leaves the better because smaller leaves decompose faster and won’t build up and create thatch.

Keep Mowing Your Lawn

Here in Minnesota most of our lawns are of the cool-season variety such as Kentucky bluegrass and the fescue family. Cool-season grasses are grasses that do their growing during the cooler parts of the year such as early spring and fall. So keeping your grass trimmed at the proper height is still important at least until the first frost.

Weed Control

Weed control in the fall should be simple if you followed proper weed control in the summer. Fall weed control should consist of targeting stray weeds that have slipped through the cracks and eliminating them before they go to seed. Just one dandelion plant can spread hundreds of seeds throughout your lawn where they will wait to invade your lawn next spring.

Unclog Your Gutters

In the fall, leaves can easily clog your gutters if you don’t have any gutter guards on them. When gutters get clogged water doesn’t drain properly and remains in the gutter for a long time. Clogged gutters are attractive places for mosquitoes to deposit their eggs. Over the winter, freezing and thawing could cause damage to your gutters and roof. 

Prune Your Trees and Shrubs

After your trees have shed their leaves and have gone dormant it is the ideal time to prune them. Trees heal much faster when they are dormant and are a lot less likely to be exposed to pests and diseases. Prune limbs that hang too close to the ground, branches that form odd angles to the trunk, and limbs that compete with the central trunk.

Aerate Your yard

Lawn aeration is usually done around this time of the year because cool-season grasses have time to recover before winter. Aeration is a beneficial process that relieves soil compaction. Soil becomes compact from frequent use and foot traffic. Over time, the soil particles become so tightly packed that not even air can get through to the roots. This causes your grass to wither and die. Compact soil also deprives your grass of water and nutrients. Aeration works by pulling thousands of small plugs of sod to loosen up the soil and allow water and air to flow again into the roots. Symptoms of soil compaction include:

Overseed Your Yard

Overseeding is a secret tool among homeowners to help increase the defense of your lawn. The process involves adding new types of grass seed to your current lawn. The idea is that by blending two different grass types together your grass will become more resilient to pests, diseases, and drought. Overseeding is often done directly after aeration because during this time your lawn is primed for seeding. Overseeding will help to boost your grass’s immune system and together, aeration and overseeding can help develop a more thick, lush lawn. 

Let the Professionals Help!

At Showcase Lawn Care we know what it takes to achieve a beautiful yard. Our aeration and overseeding program is perfect if your lawn could use a boost. Call us at (763) 415-7383, or fill out this quick, easy form to get started!