Month: June 2017

It’s common for fungal infections to invade your grass during the summer. The combination of moisture and cool weather at night make your yard welcoming to some diseases.

Dollar Spot

June is the time when you may start noticing a lawn disease called Dollar Spot. Dollar Spot is a fungal infection that looks like a small, tan- or brownish-colored circular spot that’s the size of a silver dollar. (Don’t have any silver dollars lying around? It’s about 2 ½ inches in diameter.)

When your yard is deficient in nitrogen, it makes it easy for the Dollar Spot fungus to take hold and grow. Since the fungus can be easily carried from place to place through foot traffic, wind, and water, it can spread easily, until the spots start to combine to form much-larger-than-dollar-sized spots. In the morning, when there’s dew on the ground, you may also see some cotton-like threads in the spots—a bit like what spider webs look like.

It grows in various temperatures, too – from about 50 degrees in the evenings to up to 90 degrees during the summer time. Fungicide treatments can eliminate Dollar Spot, so it’s best to call a lawn care company if you suspect this disease has invaded your yard.

Leaf Spot

Although it’s called Leaf spot, this fungal disease can also damage your grass. The spores sit on your grass during the winter and are activated once temperature each about 60 degrees in the spring. Since it grows well in wet areas, rain and dew can make this condition worse. It spreads through spores on the wind, or through foot traffic, and will become worse in the hot, dry summer. Your grass will be marked by lesions and look dried out. Some homeowners believe that their grass just needs to be watered more, but during this time, your grass can become very damaged.

As with Dollar Spot, Leaf Spot can be treated through fungicide, and with proper lawn care, likely won’t appear again.

Superior Lawn Care’s five-step lawn application program ensures that your lawn is resistant to disease with custom-mixed fertilizer, weed control, and insect protection. Increase your property’s curb appeal, and enjoy a healthy, green, thick lawn this summer and fall. Call Superior Lawn Care today. We provide service to all of southwestern Pennsylvania, including Pittsburgh, Wexford, Penn Township, Upper St. Clair, and Cranberry.

It’s not only the weather and lawn diseases that affect the health of your grass in the summer. Insects who like to snack on your grass and plantings are also to blame. In the summer, you may notice that areas of your grass have turned yellow and then brown. That’s often caused by insects, and your #1 insect enemies in June and July are chinch bugs.

What’s a Chinch Bug?

Chinch bugs are small insects. In the winter, adult chinch bugs will head somewhere that protects them from the cold and snow, and then in the spring, they mate. New bugs are born in May, and those young chinch bugs are hungry. They’ll pierce blades of grass and then suck the sap out. If the adult insects have had the chance to produce lots of eggs, that will result in more damaged grass. As these bugs grow off the sap in your grass, they will continue to reproduce, and usually more eggs are laid in mid-summer, with another wave coming in August.

Chinch bugs are tiny, and the young ones are red with a white band. Adults are grayish black and have white wings that fold flat over their midsection.

What Does the Grass Look Like?

Once a chinch bug begins to feed on a grass blade, it will change to a yellowish color, then to brown, and will die. Then, the young chinch bugs will move onto another blade. Usually, you’ll see lots of brown grass, with perfectly healthy-looking green blades mixed in. These bugs aren’t picky—they like all kinds of grass. While their destructive phase starts in early summer, it’s not until mid-to-late summer when you may really notice damage to your grass.

Homeowners often confuse chinch-bug infested grass with heat stress. You can turn over the thatch and dirt where you see brown blades, and look to see if you find chinch bugs burrowing in the ground. They’ll move fast because they don’t like sunlight.

How Can You Rid Your Pittsburgh Lawn of Chinch Bugs?

Give Superior Lawn Care a call. We come to your home, find out if your grass is suffering from chinch bug damage, and then we can set you up with our all-season lawn program. It includes an insect control application that protects your grass from chinch bugs and other lawn-destroying insects.

Superior Lawn Care provides full-service lawn care programs for southwestern Pennsylvania, including Indiana, Penn Township, Wexford Murrysville, Greensburg, Peters Township, and Upper St. Clair. Call us today to learn more and to protect your yard from hungry insects.