Don't Water Yet

We have an old customer who is an over-waterer.  He sold his house, and so the new owner is our new customer.  The new customer asked me the other day, "Why does my lawn look dead when so many of our neighbor's yards are so green?" 

"Two reasons," I said.  The lawn hadn't been fertilized in the fall (per old customer's request), and more importantly, the former owner was such an over-waterer that the lawn has a really shallow and weak root system.  It can't effectively absorb the fertilizer we put down in late March, which has since been carried deep underground by all the wet weather we've been having lately.  Soon it will wake up, now that the ground is getting saturated.

And we have another customer, who waters his lawn every day.  He says that if he skips even one day, his lawn will go pale and turn brown.  And he's right, because he has no roots.  The more you water, the more you have to water.

Grass roots grow best in the Fall, when the plant's energy is focused underground for the upcoming winter (hence the Fall fertilizer).  They grow second best in Spring.  When we get dry spells in between wet ones, the grass can start to look dry, and it's tempting to want to keep the level of moisture up by watering.  But the temperatures are still relatively cool, and you can be sure that when the blades get dry, the roots are diving deep, looking for water.

So a little tough love in the spring will do the lawn a lot of good when the heat of summer is on.  The same is true for your plants.  Of course, if you have a plant you really like and it needs more water, go ahead.  But at my house we have a saying: "If it can't get with our watering program, it has no business being in our organization."