Just go outside for a few minutes, and you can’t deny that summer is here. It’s hot, humid, and on many days downright miserable. How’s your lawn handling this heat? Any brown patches or weeds? That’s where a good spray program will help.

Spraying steps
The first step is fertilizer. Grass needs this boost when it’s actively growing, and in Florida, that’s just about all the time. Pick a fertilizer that contains slow-release nitrogen. This will give your lawn nutrients over a matter of time—not all at once. Yellow grass can sometimes be a sign of a lack of nitrogen.

Then comes the math. Measure your lawn. Now, look at the bag of fertilizer, divide 100 by the percent of nitrogen in the product; that’s the number that you need per 1,000 square feet of grass. For example, take a fertilizer with 20 percent nitrogen and divide that by 100, that means you need five pounds of that fertilizer for every 1,000 square feet of your lawn.

The next step is controlling weeds with a suitable herbicide. There’s a bunch of different types. So, be sure to choose wisely based on what you want to do.
Here are the basics:

• Systemic herbicide – kills the entire weed, down to the roots
• Contact herbicide – kills the portion of the weed that it touches
• Selective herbicide – kills weeds and not grass
• Non-selective herbicide – kills everything

There are also different types of fungi to face. Brown patch disease is a common one. This fungus is hard to spot in the summer because grass grows fast, but too much rain and water in the roots causes this stuff to form. If you notice some discolored circular areas, it’s best to treat it right away. There are a few products on the market that will fight fungus, heads-up, it’s usually a four-week treatment plan.

It’s to the battle the bugs. There is the kind that lives above the ground, like chinch bugs and others that eat the roots from the dirt, like grubs. Time is vital. It doesn’t take these suckers long to multiply and destroy your lawn.

There’s a lot to learn, and we just touched on the basics, we haven’t even started to look into pre-emergent and post-emergent, among other things. Before you start measuring your yard, reading the labels on fertilizer bags, and filling a shopping cart with all different kinds of chemicals contact us. We are licensed experts and love turning brown grass green.