Lawn-gevity

Keep your personal green acre lush with these tips

IN THE BEAUTIFUL TRI-VILLAGE AREA

– where large, mature trees and homes are main players in the ambience – the annual rite and struggle to maintain great-looking lawns, most of which are older and bounded by generous shrub plantings, is underway.

Many homeowners find themselves trying to overcome nature’s forces to enhance their landscaping as they strive to keep the maturity that has grown through the years. In time, success can become a problem due to overgrown shrubs, ones that simply don’t look good because they’re from a different era and once-young trees that now cast shade on formerly sunny areas.

For about 10 years Grandview Heights native Shawn Rine has dealt with all of it – first as a kid making money mowing grass and now as the 21-year-old owner of Rine Landscape Group, a landscaping and lawn care company that operates primarily in the Tri-Village area. To further his knowledge and business acumen, he is studying business and landscape horticulture at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

For Tri-Village homeowners who must maintain lawns that have been around for nearly a century or who want to improve appearance of their landscaping, but don’t want to lose mature shrubs, Rine works with what’s there to develop another planting scheme, he says.

“We basically cut them way down and they look like hell for a year,” he says of some bushes that must stay.

Sometimes, Rine’s crews re-plant smaller, mature trees, such as dogwoods, that were put in the wrong place initially.

At one Marble Cliff home, in an overgrown area beside the house, various bushes were removed or cut back, a walkway of street bricks was added through what had been the grown-up area and various lower-grow- ing but similar plant material was added. Oak leaf hydrangeas, Koreanspice viburnum and honey suckle were among the new materials that were planted in a thinned pattern to replace the former thicket. Some plants, such as German ivy, were cut back but left at the owner’s wishes. “They wanted it to stay natural but not too flashy,” Rine says.

More often, Rine faces the basic challenge of keeping the grass alive and thriving.

“Homeowners say, ‘I like the large trees.’ That’s one big challenge. People want golf course grass and 80-year-old trees,” Rine says, explaining the conflict that trees use a lot of water and nutrients and create shade that doesn’t help grass grow.

For a green, lush lawn, Rine recommends following these rules:

1. Fertilize four or five times a year to add nutrients and control weeds.

Fertilizers homeowners buy are not quite as potent as those professionals use, he says, but they all contain the nutrients – nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus – vital for a healthy lawn. An analogy would be over-the-counter drugs compared to prescription drugs, he says, in that both work, but only professionals can properly apply stronger chemicals, especially those to treat certain problems, such as fungus.

2. Cut no more than one-third of grass blade length and mulch rather than collect cuttings, unless they clump when cut.

Grass blades, Rine says, are mostly water and little plant material and decompose rapidly. “That’s a huge sack of nitrogen,” he says, and they quickly spread the nutrient to the soil. If grass is too long and clumps when mowed, cuttings should be removed because they may damage grass before decomposing.

3. Monitor water so that the lawn receives one inch per week (including rainfall), delivered over several days in fractions of an inch, rather than all at once.

To keep track of the amount of water delivered by your sprinkler, place small containers midway between the sprinkler and end of spray to determine an average application, Rine says. If measuring from your own sprinkler, place the container midway between the source and end of spray to get an average. Overwatering can foster fungus and it is not always absorbed.

4. Aerate and cross-seed in the fall. Best done in the fall when the ground is warmer, cross-seeding fills in bare spots. Rine cross-seeds with a hybrid fescue and blue grass that is heat-tolerant, drought-resistant and similar in appearance to Kentucky blue grass. It grows underground stems that help it spread. Even in a blue grass lawn, it’s good to have mixture of grasses, he says. Crossseed germination can be aided with a machine that makes small slits or holes in the turf, a process known as aeration.

Success with lawn care is not easy. Two annual applications of fertilizer are not enough. Proper watering won’t get immediate results when it’s just introduced to a new or dry lawn. It’s better to let grass go dormant if it wilts from drought, Rine says. Trying to revive grass with additional water is pointless as excess water likely won’t be absorbed.

“It takes persistence,” Rine says.

Duane St. Clair is a contributing editor. Feedback welcome at laurand@pubgroupltd.com.