Winters in Sandy, Utah are infamous for their freezing, long cold spells. Without proper maintenance, this can leave your lawn lifeless and not ready to meet the incoming spring. If you want your lawn to stay beautiful through winter and vibrant in spring, you have to follow a set of lawn maintenance techniques.

Aerate and fertilize before the first frosting

Stay tuned on your area’s first expected frost date. Before it comes, it’s a good practice to aerate and fertilize your lawn. This is like feeding before a long hibernation. If you’ve never aerated before, it’s best to water your lawn with an inch of water the day before you aerate to soften it.

After opening up your lawn, it’s the perfect time to fertilize it with your fertilizer of choice. Doing so will equip your grass with essential nutrients as it prepares for winter. As it hibernates in winter, it absorbs and stores the nutrients. When spring comes, it taps into its reservoir of nutrients to stay green and lush early on. Never fertilize with a frozen soil as most of it will just wash away.

Make sure to clean up your lawn

Fall could have left a pile of leaves on your lawn that can be harmful to it. When left on the lawn, leaves can become too wet and form a mat that can invite damaging pests like mice and insects or develop snow mold. Removing these and any other debris like logs is crucial as they can smother the grass and cause all kinds of trouble. This is also a good year-round practice in landscaping in Sandy, Utah.

Cut the grass a little shorter than usual

To prepare for winter, continue to mow the lawn as the weather gets cooler and until it stops growing. Let your mower go over the fallen leaves as it will help them decompose quickly and add helpful organic matter into the soil. This will also help prevent the buildup of harmful leave mats.

Also, during winter, you need to cut the grass a little shorter than usual to prevent it from smothering itself, causing diseases, and getting frozen and thawed. But you don’t want to cut it too short, either, as this can encourage weeds and diseases. This can also expose the crown of the plant to extreme conditions.

Weed your lawn in fall

Winters in Sandy, Utah can be harsh, making it impossible to go out and weed. It’s best to do this in fall as the temperature is just cooling down. Fall is a perfect time to control weeds by digging them up manually or spot-treating problematic areas with herbicides. Herbicides are more effective on cool days when the temperature is 50 degrees or so since weeds will be actively growing.

If you’re properly caring for your lawn throughout the year, you will have healthy grass, and that’s the best way to fight off weeds. Healthy grass shades the soil, and this stops weed seeds from germinating in the first place. Winter is a hibernation season for grass, and they would need all the help they could get to go through it as easily as possible. If maintained right, your lawn will be lively and vibrant in spring.