Your lawn will turn brown in times of drought, but don’t worry – it’s essentially hibernating until conditions improve! This is a protective strategy to keep its underground roots healthy by abandoning leaf growth. Sporadic watering to try to green up a lawn again is just going to stress your lawn by bringing it in and out of dormancy. It’s better to just give your lawn about a half an inch of water every 2 weeks – enough to keep the roots alive, but not enough to pull it out of dormancy and turn green again. Read more about allowing dormancy.

It’s a futile effort to fertilize a brown lawn to try to bring it out of dormancy – the grass roots won’t take up any of the nutrients, and you may end up feeding weeds. If you do want to fertilize, save it for the Fall.

• Fertilizer tip: The 3-number sequence on your bag of fertilizer represent the amount of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium nutrients in the fertilizer. Make sure the middle number is 0, or you may be contributing phosphorus runoff to our lakes and creeks. (and, it’s the law!)

If your lawn is dormant, stay off of it whenever possible. Any activity will just stress your lawn further. Hold off on completing any projects such as aerating your lawn, to allow the roots to retain all the moisture they can. You don’t even need to mow, because a dormant lawn won’t be growing any taller.

You can read the full post (including what to do before or after the drought) from our partners at RPBCWD here: Lawn Care