As any yard care aficionado will tell you, lawn maintenance can eat up a fair amount of time. While most of us strive to keep our lawns as healthy and vibrant as possible, there are only so many hours in the day, and not every homeowner is keen on dedicating valuable leisure time to lawn maintenance. Fortunately, maintaining a healthy lawn doesn’t have to entail saying goodbye to your downtime. So, if tending to your lawn isn’t your preferred way to spend a day off, put these time-saving pointers to good use.
Hire a Professional Lawn Care Company
One of the best ways to save time on lawn maintenance is to take yourself out of the equation entirely. By outsourcing the maintenance of your yard to a professional lawn care company, you can ensure the continued health of your grass without lifting a finger. The right company will handle your mowing, watering, fertilization and aeration needs – among many other tasks. So, if you lack the inclination or free time to throw yourself into yard maintenance, handing the reins to a seasoned lawn care company can lift a tremendous weight off your shoulders.
Before hiring a lawn care company, confirm that the company is both licensed and insured. Although companies that lack licensing and/or insurance tend to charge less for their services, they generally offer a far lower degree of accountability. Additionally, perusing reviews and feedback from other clients online can provide you with a solid understanding of a company’s approach to customer service and overall dependability. Needless to say, if a company’s unfavorable reviews far outnumber its favorable ones, you’d be wise to take your business elsewhere.
Automate the Watering Process
If manually watering your lawn on a regular basis doesn’t strike you as an appealing prospect, consider automating the process. For example, you can save time – and water – by investing in an automated sprinkler system that dispenses specific amounts of water at specific times. This will help ensure that your lawn receives exactly as much water as it needs exactly when it needs it. Alternatively, if you live in an area that regularly receives heavy rainfall, you may be able to take yourself out of the watering process entirely. Depending on how much rain your locale receives, Mother Nature may be able to supply all the water your grass requires.
If you lack the funds for an automated sprinkler system and are unable to depend on rainfall, you may still be able to save time on watering. Instead of watering your lawn on a daily basis, switch to watering deeply but infrequently. This will provide your grass with plenty of time to soak up water and assorted nutrients and make it more resilient in the long run. If you regularly give your grass more water than it needs, it will come to depend on large amounts of water and grow weak in the absence of excess watering.
Stop Over-Mowing Your Lawn
Far too many us approach mowing improperly. Believing we’re doing what’s best for our grass, we habitually cut our lawns too short and too often. In addition to creating more work for ourselves, over-mowing can prove highly detrimental to the overall health of our lawns. The shorter grass is kept, the more water it requires. This is because excessively short blades of grass are poorly-equipped to soak in water and receive nutrients. While cutting your grass to the shortest possible height may give your lawn a nice uniform appearance, it doesn’t bode well for its long-term well-being. With this in mind, make a point of adhering to the “One Third Rule” and never cutting your grass more than one third of the height.
Consistent lawn maintenance is among the foremost responsibilities that come with homeownership. However, depending on the size of your yard and the type of grass that populates it, properly caring for your lawn is liable to eat up a fair amount of time. While it can’t be denied that proper lawn care requires a bit of work, there’s no reason it should infringe on your leisure time to an excessive degree. If you want to help your lawn look its best without sacrificing your well-earned downtime, the previously discussed measures are likely to come in handy.
