How to Prevent Lawn Diseases From Overtaking Your Lawn

Weeds are pretty easy to spot in your lawn most of the time. But lawn diseases are another story.

The right conditions can bring them about without warning. And since most of the lawn diseases out there resemble a patchy or irregularly shaped brown spot, how can you tell one from another? In fact, for all you know, those blemishes could be from drought or evidence of where your dog likes to mark his territory instead of a lawn disease. 

Luckily, there are a few common lawn diseases that pop up in Northeast Ohio. Let’s talk about these diseases and how to prevent lawn fungus in your yard. 

Understanding Lawn Disease in Northeast Ohio

Preventing lawn disease begins with understanding how it comes about in your grass. 

In fact, you need three things to bring about lawn disease: your grass (or the host), the disease or pathogen, and an environment that is favorable to disease production. An example of a favorable environmental condition may be too much water at a time of day when humidity is also high. 

Many lawns in Northeast Ohio may have diseases lurking, but the environment isn’t prime to encourage it to grow and spread. 

Preventing Lawn Disease Starts With Good Lawn Care

Even though lawn disease is present in your lawn possibly even now, that doesn’t mean it always has to grow or become visible. 

Excess stress is what can cause diseases to strike, in addition to ripe conditions for their growth. 

So, for instance, if you mow your lawn too short, you can stress it out and encourage disease. Northeast Ohio lawns should be between 3 to 4 inches in height over the summer months, and you should never remove more than one-third of the grass blade at any one time. So this means you should be mowing your lawn weekly during the growing season to ensure you keep it at an optimal height and don’t stress it out. 

Watering properly is also important when it comes to preventing lawn diseases. If you overwater, for instance, you could be amplifying those overly humid, wet conditions in your lawn. You don’t want to water too frequently; you want to water slow and deep at less frequent intervals. You also want your grass blades to dry out between waterings and before the warm, summer evening hours to prevent those ideal disease-growing conditions. 

Improper fertilization is also something that can encourage disease; both under- and over-fertilizing can be bad. A lawn care professional can give your lawn the right nutrients in the right time frames and in a consistent manner to ensure ideal applications. 

Embracing fall aeration and overseeding services can also help eliminate compaction and further thicken your lawn to help protect it from disease. 

How to Treat Lawn Disease

Sometimes just following the above cultural practices can keep lawn disease at bay in your lawn. 

This is when you may need a preventive fungicide application as a part of your lawn care program. Make sure you work with a lawn care professional who is an expert on Northeast Ohio lawns and can properly identify and treat lawn diseases. That way the treatment option you choose will work for your specific problem and get you back to a healthy, happy lawn as quickly as possible. 

Let Turf Pride Up Help You Prevent Lawn Disease

Now that you know more about lawn disease, you will likely have a better chance of recognizing the conditions that cause it to come about and how to care for your lawn properly to keep it away. 

Remembering to care for your lawn health overall with adequate fertilization, proper watering, precise mowing, and aeration and overseeding is crucial. 

If you still find you have some unexplained, weird spots in your lawn, give Turf Pride a call. We can assist in identifying the disease and taking care of the problem. We can also provide you with solid tips for preventing the problem in the future. 

Are lawn diseases keeping you from having a yard you can be proud of? Turf Pride can help. Get started today with a free quote. Together, we’ll customize a plan that gives you the most attractive lawn on the block.