Lawn Care

The Seven-Step Lawn Care Program is the whole business. It is a full-year plan set by a soil test and run off soil temperature and what the turf is actually doing, not a date printed on a corporate calendar in another state.

It starts with a sample sent to Waypoint Analytical, an independent agronomic lab that runs testing for golf courses across the Southeast. The report comes back with pH, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium and a lime requirement, and that is what sets the targets for the year. In this part of Georgia the first answer is usually lime: Piedmont clay runs acid, often down near pH 5.0, and below about 6.0 a good share of the fertilizer you paid for stays chemically locked up where the roots cannot get at it. Correcting pH is the cheapest thing we do and it is what makes everything after it work.

From there the visits get timed to conditions instead of dates. Pre-emergent goes down when soil temperature at two inches holds 50 to 55°F, ahead of crabgrass germination, because once it is up you are buying a different and more expensive product. Nitrogen waits until the lawn is fully green and has been mowed two or three times; feeding a half-dormant Bermuda lawn burns through the carbohydrate reserves it needs to finish waking up. On every visit the technician walks the property for insect pressure, disease and weed breakthrough, and treats what is there rather than what the schedule says should be.

We also will not put a product down in the wrong conditions. Most broadleaf herbicides injure turf above the high eighties, several need a dry window afterward to translocate, and nothing should go on turf that is already drought-stressed. If the day is wrong, we come back.

What is included

• Soil test at an independent agronomic lab, with lime and pH correction where the report calls for it
• Seven visits a year, timed to soil temperature and growth stage rather than to dates
• Separate warm-season (Bermuda, Zoysia) and cool-season (tall fescue) programs
• Pre-emergent split across two applications so the barrier holds through the whole germination window
• Insect, disease and weed scouting on every single visit
• Nitrogen stopped 30 days ahead of first frost, with potassium in its place for cold hardiness
• Mowing, pruning and bed work available alongside the program

Serving your area

We run lawn care across Northwest Georgia and East Alabama out of our Rome office, on the same clay and the same climate everywhere on this list, so the timing that works on one of these lawns works on the next one.