How To Prepare Your Lawn For Spring

Towards the end of winter as the hours of sunshine increase and we gradually remove layers of warm clothing, our lawns will start to wake up from their winter slumber. The lawn, made up of thousands of hungry plants, will need lots of nutrients to prepare it for the busy spring ahead.

So it's important to feed the lawn at the end of winter so there is a buffet of nutrients to promote healthy green spring growth.

Yates® Dynamic Lifter® Concentrated Lawn Food is an organic based lawn fertiliser that provides dual benefits. It contains fast acting nutrients to promote quick, visible lawn-greening results. And the rich organic matter promotes soil health, as well as providing slow release organic nutrients.

The small granules in Yates Dynamic Lifter Concentrated Lawn Food are specially designed for lawns, easily filtering down to the soil where they'll get to work.

Yates Dynamic Lifter Concentrated Lawn Food contains a concentrated formula and the 7 kg bag feeds 250 m2 of lawn.

At the end of winter spread around 70 grams (approximately one adult handful) over 2.5 square metres of established lawn and water in well after  application.  It's  suitable for feeding all lawn types, including buffalo, couch and kikuyu. To promote continued rich green lawn growth and soil health, reapply Yates Dynamic Lifter Concentrated Lawn Food in early summer and early autumn.

Flooding rains and high humidity in many parts of Australia during autumn created ideal conditions for several lawn diseases to develop. Towards the end of winter, lawn beetles will also begin their breeding cycle, ready to lay eggs that turn into damaging curl grubs. Here's how to protect your lawn.

Rainfall and humidity, together with mild temperatures can promote the development of lawn diseases such as fusarium, brown patch, dollar spot and (the difficult to pronounce) helminthosporium.

»   Symptoms of lawn diseases can include grass leaves or patches of lawn turning yellow or brown or dead areas developing.

»   To help reduce the incidence of lawn disease, only water the lawn in the morning, which gives the grass a chance to dry off during the day. Wet foliage overnight can exacerbate diseases.

»   Also, if the soil under the lawn is compacted or poorly drained, which can lead to more moisture pooling on the soil surface and promote diseases, aerating the soil using a garden fork or a lawn corer can help.

»    To control common lawn diseases apply Yates Mancozeb Plus over the lawn using a sprayer.

»   Curl grubs (pictured above) are a common and destructive lawn insect pest during spring. Adult African black beetles mate and lay eggs during early spring, which hatch into curl grubs.

These ravenous curl grubs chew through lawn roots, causing dead and dying patches throughout the lawn. Sections of affected lawn can also be rolled back like a carpet, as the grubs destroy the lawn's root system.

»   You can help stop the curl grub life cycle by controlling the adult African black beetle during late winter, before it has had the chance to lay eggs. Apply Baythroid® Advanced Insect Killer for Lawns over the lawn using a sprayer then water the lawn thoroughly to move the product down into the soil where the beetles are.