Simple Ideas for Better Homes, Gardens & Outdoor Spaces
Achieving a thick, vibrant, and healthy green lawn takes more than just regular mowing—it requires the right strategy, proper timing, and top-quality supplies. Welcome to our Lawn Care category, your ultimate destination for professional-grade fertilizers, premium grass seed, maintenance equipment, and expert advice. Whether you are repairing patchy spots from the summer heat, overseeding to thicken your turf, or establishing a brand-new yard from scratch, we have everything you need to cultivate an outdoor space you can be proud of.
A lawn can look fine on a Monday and have bare, chewed-off patches by the weekend. That speed is the first clue. Drought damage and fungal disease usually creep across turf over weeks, but a caterpillar outbreak can strip a stretch of grass in days. Often the first thing anyone notices is birds. Starlings and … Read more
A patch of lawn turns straw-colored in late summer, but the sprinklers have been running and the neighboring grass is fine. Grab a handful of the dead turf and pull. If it lifts like a loose piece of carpet, with no roots holding it down, the problem is almost certainly underground. Pale, C-shaped grubs are … Read more
A brown, ragged patch appears in the lawn. The grass looks chewed or scalped rather than dried out. Birds keep landing there to peck at it, and watering doesn’t help. Many homeowners treat this as drought or fungus, and it can go on for weeks before anyone looks closely at the ground. When the cause … Read more
A patch of lawn turns yellow, then straw-brown, in the sunniest, hottest part of the yard, usually beside a driveway or sidewalk. The obvious diagnosis is drought, so you water. The patch keeps growing anyway. That is the classic chinch bug story, and the confusion is costly because chinch bug damage will not respond to … Read more
You water on schedule. You fertilize in spring and fall. You mow at the right height. And the lawn still looks tired by late summer — thin in the high-traffic areas, slow to green back up, puddling near the patio after a hard rain. That pattern usually points to one thing: the soil underneath the … Read more
By late August, a lot of lawns start showing the wear of a long growing season. Bare patches where the dog runs the same path every day. Thin spots under the shade of a maple that got denser over the summer. Areas that just never quite filled back in after a hot, dry stretch in … Read more
Two pieces of fall lawn advice make the rounds every year, and they point in opposite directions. One says to drop the mower deck for the final cut so the grass can’t flop over under snow and rot. The other says a short cut leaves the plant exposed just when it’s storing energy for winter. … Read more
By late September, a lot of lawns start sending mixed signals. The grass still looks reasonably green, but it’s thinning in the high-traffic spots, water seems to run off instead of soaking in, and the mower is kicking up more dust than clippings. That combination — thin turf, hard soil, and a slowing growth rate … Read more
A thin scatter of leaves across the lawn doesn’t do much harm. A wet, matted layer that sits there for two or three weeks is a different story. Underneath it, grass blades stop getting light, the soil stays damp longer than it should, and by the time the leaves finally get raked off in November, … Read more
Your lawn looks like a bag of stale potato chips. Crunchy, brown, and giving off a sad little dust cloud every time you walk across it. You water it, you stare at it, you water it some more, and nothing changes. Meanwhile your neighbor’s grass is somehow still green and you’re starting to take it … Read more