A Beautiful Lawn: better curb appeal

The key to a beautiful garden is having beautiful edges both inside and out.   A garden or flower bed edge can be lined with more flowers, rocks, stone edges or any other store-bought edging material.  Outside the bed, the edge of grass must look just as nice.  If your lawn is neglected, then the curb appeal will be diminished as passersby notice the poor lawn and not your beautiful garden beds.

In previous years, our family has hired a lawn service company to spray treatments of fertilizer, weed control, and anything to make our lawn greener and more lush.  Unfortunately, I was rarely satisfied.  Although the lawn looked great, their attempt to steer clear of my beds meant that weeds were always left lurking along the edges.  These same weeds eventually tip-toed over the borders and into my flower and garden beds.  Spending my summer pulling out weeds that originated from the grass was not my idea of fun.  So this year I have taken matters in to my own hands and found a few tips and common mistakes along the way.

1. Begin your season now with the crab grass preventer.  I prefer the Scotts products and have already laid it down on our lawn.  It’s best to do this a day or two a good rainfall.
2. Sign up for reminders about when and how to apply your lawn products. At http://www.scotts.com/, I signed in and recorded my first day of application for the year.  They’ll now send me reminders of when to do the next application.  It’s that easy!
3. Buy a good drop spreader.  After researching spreaders, I found the drop spreader to be much better at application than the rotary spreader.  Sure, the rotary gets the job done faster as it sprays it out into a larger area, however, most people don’t realize you’re supposed to go back over it again in the opposite direction.  This way, you have two applications (something the commercial lawn pros don’t do either).  With a drop spreader, you cover your lawn with one “stripe” of lawn at a time, just as you would if you were mowing.  The advantage is that I can now go right up to my bed edges and get those lurking weeds. 
4. You can spray weeds now.  Despite what I had been told in the past by companies, if you have weeds growing now (due to a warmer winter), you can spray them now.  There are many products that will kill the weeds and not the lawn.  Our neighborhood has been hijacked by chickweed but this chick has put a stop to it in her yard!