The first question to answer is what kind of grass you have, because the calendar changes completely. Most lawns in Forsyth and north Fulton are warm-season grasses — Bermuda or Zoysia — that go brown and dormant in winter and grow hard from May to September. Fescue is the cool-season exception: it stays green through winter, struggles in July, and is the one lawn you seed rather than sod. If your grass turns straw-colored after the first hard frost, it's warm-season. If it's green in January, it's fescue.
February and March are for pre-emergent. Crabgrass and the other summer weeds germinate when soil temperatures pass about 55 degrees, which around here is usually early March. A pre-emergent applied before that — and a second application in late spring — stops most of them before they show up. Miss it and you're pulling crabgrass in July. This is also the time to service the mower and sharpen the blade; a dull blade tears grass and leaves the tips brown.
April is when warm-season lawns wake up, and the temptation is to feed them the moment they green. Wait. Fertilizing Bermuda or Zoysia before it's fully out of dormancy feeds the weeds, not the grass. The first feeding goes down once the lawn is about ninety percent green — usually late April or early May — and then every four to six weeks through August. Fescue is the opposite: it's fed in fall and lightly in early spring, and never in summer heat.
May through September is mowing season, and the rule is simple: never take more than a third of the blade at once. Bermuda likes to be cut short, around one to two inches, and weekly; Zoysia a little taller. Fescue wants three to four inches and shade from its own height in summer. Cutting a lawn hard every three weeks because it 'looks long' stresses the grass more than anything else you can do to it. Weekly, at the right height, with a sharp blade, is most of what makes a lawn look professionally kept.
Water in the morning, deeply and less often. An inch a week, in two or three sessions before 9 AM, grows deeper roots than a light sprinkle every evening — and evening watering leaves the grass wet overnight, which is how brown patch and other fungal diseases get started in Georgia humidity. If you have an irrigation system, this is what it should be programmed to do, and a rain sensor keeps it from running through a thunderstorm.
June is aeration month for warm-season lawns. Our red clay compacts hard, and core aeration — pulling plugs out of the lawn — opens it up so water, air and fertilizer get to the roots. Do it when the grass is growing strongly enough to fill in, which for Bermuda and Zoysia is early summer. Fescue is aerated in September, and that's when it's overseeded too: the seed goes into the aeration holes, and fall's cooler nights are what it needs to establish before winter.
October and November wind things down. Warm-season lawns get a last mow slightly taller than usual, a fall pre-emergent for winter weeds like poa annua and henbit, and then they're left alone; fertilizing them in fall pushes tender growth that the first frost kills. Fescue gets its main feeding now. Leaves come off the lawn every week or two — a mat of wet oak leaves through December will smother the grass under it. And this is when to winterize the sprinkler system before the first freeze.
If that sounds like a lot to keep track of, it's exactly what a maintenance schedule is for. Call Ga Panther Scapes at (404) 621-9107 and we'll walk the lawn, tell you what it is and what it needs, and put the price in writing before we bring a mower.