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The secret to a healthy lawn is having a detailed lawn care routine. Many kinds of fungi pose the risk of damaging your lawn. Fungi can ruin even the most pristine and well-maintained lawn quickly.
The best way to keep fungus from ruining your lawn is by applying a preventative fungicide treatment to your lawn care routine. Once your lawn is infected, getting rid of the disease and having to repair the damage can be expensive, challenging, and consuming.
Fortunately, using a preventative fungicide for lawn care helps keep your lawn disease free and healthy.
What’s the difference between lawn care and lawn maintenance?
Lawn care refers to the process of giving overall care to your lawn to maintain the health of the soil and turf. Lawn care involves treating your lawn, fertilization, soil health and turf disease management, weed control, and fungicide treatment.
Sometimes, people need clarification on lawn care and lawn maintenance since both focus on improving your lawn’s aesthetics. The difference is that lawn care routines are designed to boost your lawn’s and soil’s general health.
Lawn maintenance, on the other hand, is more of a clean-up involving the removal of leaves and debris and mowing grass. Maintenance aims to upgrade the feel and look of your lawn.
What Is Fungicide For Lawn?
There are typically two forms of fungicide:
Contact fungicide for lawn lands outside the lawn’s blades to form a creative barrier against the diseases that could potentially penetrate the grass blade. In many cases, contact fungicide is used as a preventative measure applied before a disease approaches.
You should not water this fungicide in. It also does not impact diseases that can enter the lawn through roots.
The systemic fungicide for the lawn is directly absorbed into the lawn’s blades. It’s both curative and protective, so you can put it in a lawn care routine to prevent fungus or treat it when already infected. Also known as penetrant fungicides, they move through the blades and reach parts you cannot see easily.
Causes Of Lawn Fungal Diseases
Lawns are naturally full of spores and fungi. Some are problematic, while others are harmless. Some lawn conditions can also trigger the fungus to erupt and become a harmful disease. The following are the most common causes of lawn fungal diseases:
- Drought and stress
- Overwatering
- Cold and extensive wet periods
- Warm and humid conditions
- Too much fertilizer or the wrong fertilizer
- Improper mowing especially scalping or mowing too low
- Soil compaction
How To Use Fungicides In Your Lawn Care
A fungicide for lawn care is best used preventatively. Adding fungicides in your lawn care routine means applying them before any disease occurs. The best way to approach this is by noticing patterns. If you see summer patches recurring yearly, apply the fungicide during the fall.
Applying Fungicides For Treatment
Before applying fungicide to treat your lawn, it’s essential that you identify which fungus has affected your yard. Sometimes the type of fungus will also determine which fungicide to use. The following are the most common forms of fungus and when they occur.
- Dollar Spot: Characterized by tan spots the size of a silver dollar sprinkled across the lawn and occurs during fall and late spring.
- Brown Patch: Characterized by irregular circles of light brown, thin grass. The patches can be a few diameters or several feet. Brown spot patch typically strikes during humid and hot weather.
- Anthracnose: Reddish brown patched that fades to yellow, tan, then brown. Severe in early spring and mid-summer.
- Pink Snow Mold: Circular light pink, tan, or gray patches with a white center. Common during late winter.
- Leaf Spot and Melting out: Starts as small brown spots that enlarge to develop tan centers with purplish-red borders as the disease spreads out. The surrounding leaf tissue then turns yellow. It commonly develops in all spring, fall, and summer.
- Summer Patch: Circular or crescent-shaped patches and slow-growing wilted grass.
- Rust: Yellow speckling on the stem and blade. The yellow area spreads and grows more significant till the leaf eventually ruptures to release yellowing, orange, reddish and brown spores.
- Fairy Ring: Circular and semicircular rings that form on the infected grass.
- Read Thread: Irregular pink patches develop in the yard.
- Powdery Mildew: Isolated masses of white spores develop on the grass blade. As they grow, the fungus spreads over the whole grass blade, and the turf looks like it’s sprinkled with white flour.
Prevention Is Better Than Cure
Your lawn is prawn to fungi infections. An overgrowth of these may destroy your lawn, no matter how much you put into maintenance. A proper lawn care routine should include fungicides.
Check the patterns of previous breakouts to determine when to use which fungicide and prevent the menace before it occurs.
