Only a few days of summer are left and Iowans need to get moving if they’re going to try and reseed their lawns which were wiped out by the months-long drought. David Minner, a turfgrass specialist with the Iowa State University Extension, says there are brown yards all across the state.
While we’ve gotten some scattered rain showers, if your lawn hasn’t greened back up, Minner says, “that should be telling you something: it’s dead and you need to be doing something.” Some lawns will go “dormant” and they can be revived with watering, though he says the drought was so hot and long this year that “dormancy is kind of a theory.”
Minner says there are only a few remedies for homeowners to try to get that lawn back in shape and ready for spring before the snow flies. One option would be to use Roundup on everything, kill the entire lawn and re-seed it. Another option is to use a slicer-seeder and re-seed the yard directly. He says dead areas of the lawn that aren’t repaired this fall will likely be invaded by weeds next year.
Learn more about lawns here: www.extension.iastate.edu/topic/recovering-disasters
By Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City