Released: February 19, 2003

Winter Strategies Can Keep Lawns Healthy

MANHATTAN, Kan. – Even with recent warm temperatures, winter weather may not be over yet. Matt Fagerness, turfgrass specialist with Kansas State University Research and Extension provides suggestions for keeping a quality lawn through the remainder of the winter months.

"A warm weekend across most of the state may have many of us wondering how to guide a wide assortment of plantings, including turf, through the remaining six weeks of winter," Fagerness said.

* Warm spells and moisture are prone to make cool-season turf more active.

"We might expect to see turf become a little greener," he said, "especially with recent moisture and more forecast for the near future."

For winter annual crops like wheat, warm cycles cause problems by bringing wheat out of dormancy and exposing it to later cold spells. Cool-season turfgrasses respond to temperatures 10-20 degrees warmer than wheat, thus turf can hold up better, Fagerness said.

* Minimize traffic on frozen turf to avoid damage. Saturated, frozen soil becomes especially prone to compaction, making grass growth difficult in the spring, he said. However, soil temperatures at depths of two inches have not yet fallen into the single digits for a majority of the state.

* Watering turf can help, but you don’t need to water if we’ve had recent rain or snow.

"Questions always abound this time of year about watering turfgrass during winter," Fagerness said. "The worst scenario for turf is very cold temperatures plus an absence of snow cover, which can result in desiccation injury."

Desiccation, or death by moisture loss, often occurs as grass tissue continues to lose moisture it cannot replace, because the roots are frozen in the soil and can’t take up any water.

Because living turf turns brown in the winter, the damage often remains unnoticed until the turf fails to grow in the spring. Areas most likely damaged by desiccation are often at the crest of a rise, on top of mounds, on slopes or other areas most exposed to the wind.

Soil moisture also buffers the effect of rapid drops in temperature.

* Keep the sensitive root zone moist.

"Furthermore, to water or not to water is a judgment call," Fagerness said. "We are not trying to stimulate growth, only sustain survival."

Pulling out the sprinklers and moving them around the yard is not a big hassle and can be beneficial with a few days of warmer weather.

For homes and businesses with automatic irrigation, watering can be more cumbersome, since the time required to get the system up and running and then shut down again may not be as easily justified.

"Turf can benefit from periodic watering through winter but, if push comes to shove, focus your attention on landscape plants first," Fagerness said. "They are more sensitive to cold, dry weather than lawns."

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K-State Research and Extension is a short name for the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, a program designed to generate and distribute useful knowledge for the well-being of Kansans. Supported by county, state, federal and private funds, the program has county Extension offices, experiment fields, area Extension offices and regional research centers statewide. Its headquarters is on the K-State campus, Manhattan.

Story by:
Lucas Shivers, Communications Assistant
lshivers@oznet.ksu.edu
K-State Research& Extension News