The effects of overuse of lawns during Winter

Lawns like couch, kikuyu and buffalo go dormant during winter. This means they stop growing, potentially lose colour and can thin out during the cool months. A question we get asked is during Winter is, "How can this be kept to a minimum?"

The answer to that question can be better understood when you know a little bit more about how these grasses grow through the seasons. 

According to James B. Beard, "Warm-season turfgrasses (couch, kikuyu, and buffalo) are those species having an air temperature optimum of 26 to 35 degrees Celsius." As temperatures fall below 26 degrees, they begin to slow down until they almost come to a standstill as temperatures drop below 20. Only a temperature rise will bring them out of dormancy.

There are a couple of important takeaways from this understanding:

1. Once a lawn is dormant due to low soil temperatures, it is generally unresponsive until the Spring, when temperatures rise again.  
2. You can't improve your grass's appearance or performance once temperatures fall below the 20s. In other words, whatever your lawn looks like at the end of Autumn will be the best it will look through Winter. Typical approaches like fertilising and watering won't bring on a flush of growth simply because the lawn is dormant. 
3. Because your lawn isn't growing, it can't repair itself if it gets damaged or overused.

Worn patches due to overuse:

With this in mind, you must be mindful of how much you use your lawn during Winter. Overuse will almost always result in worn and thinning patches that won't repair till Spring. You'll need to consider limiting exposure to high amounts of traffic. This includes pet traffic, foot traffic and sport. Perhaps Clint Eastwood summed it up well in Gran Torino when he said, rather passionately, "Get off my lawn". In reality though, I'm not saying that you shouldn't use your lawn during Winter, but rather, if traffic results in discolouration and worn patches, it's important to know that your lawn won't repair till Spring and will continue to deteriorate if things don't change. In most cases, the lawn will repair itself without much input from you when the seasons change. 

Discolouration:

Colour loss during Winter is common for warm-season grasses, regardless of their brand. While some lawns are better at maintaining winter colour than others, colour loss is most often caused by external conditions rather than the lawn's natural capacity to hold colour. Common reasons include overuse, frost, disease, waterlogging, winter shade, pet damage and scalping your lawn with your lawn mower. Once the blades on the lawn are affected and or removed in any of these ways, they won't grow back until Spring for the same reason as mentioned above: the lawn is dormant.   

I understand that many people don't have a choice about how much traffic their lawn is exposed to, so in saying these things, there might not be much you can do. Having said that, there may be some changes you can make to reduce the severity of the impact of Winter, which is the purpose of this blog.  

If you have some issues with your lawn, we'd love to help you resolve them. Send us an email with a description and some pics to info@paulmunnsinstantlawn.com.au or call us on 08 28980555