Lazy Girl’s Guide to Spring Lawn Care

How I Take Care of My Spring Lawn

Using my Yard Boss to care for our spring lawn.

Disclosure: This post is sponsored by STIHL but all lawn savvy opinions are my own.

We live in New England where sprawling green lawns are the true mark of suburban living. Our home is no different and we are fortunate to have almost an acre of lawn to enjoy. But this lawn requires maintenance and care. Any googling of lawn care will pull up hundreds of links and suggestions for the right fertilizer or PH testing kit and watering apparatus, etc. Well, I don’t do any of that. I have one secret lawn care weapon and I’m sharing it with you today: my STIHL Yard Boss.

Here’s the deal with our lawn… it’s never going to be perfect because that’s not my goal. We live in the middle of the woods with wildlife and dogs and children and I have lots of things to worry about other than having a gold course worthy lawn. BUT… I do want a lush green yard for my kids to play on and for me to enjoy as I sit on the patio with a glass of wine.

You’ve seen me use my Yard Boss to create a new garden bed, but the magic of the Yard Boss is the various attachments that fit on it… the one I use the most for our lawn is the dethatcher. I run the yard boss back and forth over my lawn and the dethatcher picks up the layer of dead turf grass from the season before. You want *some* of this turf grass but not too much. 

Another step that is sometimes recommended for lawn care is to aerate which allows air and water to reach the grass roots. Spring is not the best time for this, but the Yard Boss also has an aerator attachment that could be an added tool in your lawn care arsenal.

I should also mention that because of our iMow®, our lawn naturally has a great layer of lawn fertilizer because the clippings are so small, so there’s not as much to dethatch as there might be on other lawns and I know it’s getting a little fertilizer all summer. I wrote about our robot mower a couple of years ago when it was installed and it’s still going strong!

Aside from dethatching, the only other spring lawn maintenance I do is to fill in any bare patches with topsoil and grass seed. And by bare patches, I mean places where the dogs have decided to dig. Come fall, I may go over the lawn with an all natural fertilizer, but I often look at our green yard comprised of clover and crab grass and regular grass and decide it’s not worth it given the composition of the lawn itself.

One day, we will have a lush grass backyard. And I will care for that lawn exactly as I’ve outlined above. Spring dethatching. A mulching lawn mower. Fall aeration and fertilizer. For now, I am more than satisfied with the green lawn surrounding our family home and our summer days are spent playing whiffle ball and croquet and cartwheels on it.