No one wants to look out on their lawn and see patches of dead grass. But it still happens sometimes. And if your lawn is starting to look unhealthy you’ll want to figure out what’s going on pretty quick so you can help the grass recover.
Quite a few common lawn problems are caused by something other than disease. You can click here to read an article about those. But if your lawn hasn’t been damaged by things like spilled chemicals, improper mowing, or the wrong balance of water and nutrients then there’s a good chance some kind of disease is the problem.
Learning About Lawn Disease
Disease-causing fungi are present in most soils. They’re basically sitting around waiting for the grass to weaken enough for them to attack or for soil conditions to change so they can grow faster. Several different types of fungus can cause lawn disease, but they’re often triggered by similar things. Damp soil conditions and grass that’s stressed by other factors will make it easier for a fungus to cause problems.
Understanding Your Fungus
In general, lawn disease will cause individual grass leaves to develop spots and/or loose color. They’ll also kill off patches of grass. Some diseases (like rust and anthracnose) cause reddish spots on the leaves. Others (like copper spot and dollar spot) cause roughly circular patches of the lawn to die. You’ll be able to identify your specific disease based on how the grass looks.
There are too many different types of lawn disease to go through them all in this article. For identifying specific types of lawn fungus, look at guides published by companies that make products to treat different lawn diseases, such as this article from Bayer Advanced (click here).
Getting Rid of Disease
Once you’ve identified the type of disease that’s affecting your lawn, you can start treating it. The best way to treat lawn diseases is by targeting the root cause of the problem. We’ll talk about how you can improve growing conditions in the last section of this article. But that’s not always enough to stop diseases that are already killing your grass. Sometimes you have to supplement with fungicides.
Follow package directions to treat affected areas of your lawn with a fungicide that’s designed to target the type of disease in your lawn. Don’t treat the entire lawn or continue treatment longer than recommended. You don’t want the disease to develop a resistance because you over-treated your grass. If you’d rather not treat the lawn yourself there’s always the option to hire professional help.
Preventing Future Lawn Issues
As soon as you notice disease problems in your lawn, stop mulching your mowing clippings. You should always bag clippings from affected areas of the lawn to keep the infection from spreading. Try to avoid walking through infected patches and make sure you clean any tools used there before using them on healthy areas of the lawn.
Try to improve drainage in your lawn and fill-in low spots where water could collect. You’ll also want to make sure you’re mowing the lawn in a healthy way. Be sure to mow at the correct height and only when the grass is dry. You’ll also want to avoid fertilizing the grass when it’s not actively growing, since that will stress the plants and make them susceptible to disease. And if you have to replant areas of the lawn choose disease resistant grass varieties so the problem is less likely to come back.
