Romping with your dog. Picnics with the fam. A place to host book clubs. Having a well-kept green space around your home can set the scene for all sorts of activities. But keeping it green and tidy requires a lot of work. Here’s what to do—or who to hire—to maintain splendor in the grass.
What do you want from your lawn? Can you live with some weeds and bare spots? Are you willing to wait a year or two for your outdoor space to become Eden-like? What’s your tolerance for pesticides and other chemicals?
Let any lawn care service know your wish list. If you can be patient, you may save money and minimize chemical use by limiting treatments to key times of the year, targeting problem areas, and relying heavily on techniques like core aeration.
More treatment—at least in the short term—isn’t always better. Any company can produce a flash of green growth with quick-release fertilizer, but it’ll weaken your lawn’s root systems. An outfit that treats your entire lawn with herbicides and pesticides may be less effective than one that targets limited areas and specific problems—with the least possible chemical exposure.
Whatever pro lawn treatments you get, cutting the grass correctly helps keep things lush: Use a mower with sharp blades, don’t mow too short, and remove no more than one-third of the leaf on each cutting. And water properly—typically a single dousing of about an inch per week during summer dry spells.
To choose a lawn care service, see our Ratings Tables to identify the best outfits. Get proposals from several businesses, indicating what you expect your lawn to look like and how soon you want it that way. Get companies to commit to meeting your expectations and to an overall cost. For average-size lawns, price differences of more than $300 per year are common.
Ask the company to guarantee in writing that it will refund your money for an entire year if you are not satisfied that it has met its commitments; many companies will.
