How to Mow the Lawn After Winter
Video transcription
I'm Bill Elzey with Showplace Lawn. How to mow your lawn after winter. Used to be, we would always what they call scalp the lawn. Cut it that first cut just as low as you could probably get it across there. And that was to get rid of all the stuff that was hanging around during the winter, get rid of it, and then bring the grass up from there. Since we practice nowadays of getting a nice tall thick grass and coverage to keep it from drying out, to be more healthy and so forth, we don't do that anymore. And the reason being is this, grass goes in to shock every time it's mowed. If you're going to spend the entire spring, summer and fall getting that grass to get nice and thick, why would you want to come back and shave that all off and start over again? We can accomplish the same thing by not scalping it, but by lowering the cut. In a Saint Augustine lawn for instance, if you're cutting it at a three and a half inch height, through the course of the summer and the fall, you could bring that back, your first mowing to a two inch cut. Cut it a couple of times at two inches and then raise it. Cut it once or twice, raise it again. So as by end of May, you're cutting it back at that three inch height. The same way on your Bermuda grasses, cut it a little lower but don't cut it real low. You're accomplishing getting rid of the old growth, getting that jump start on it to get it growing again, but you do not need to cut it at a scalping rate. Leave a little bit of height in your grass and you're accomplishing the same thing by getting rid of the old stuff and getting it started new again. These are some ways, this is the way to cut it after winter.