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Brown lawn? Don't water it

It may seem counter-intuitive, but once a lawn goes completely brown, it is dormant. If you try to bring it back now, it might stress it even more.

FALMOUTH, Maine — Shawn Brannigan knows lawns. He's THE lawn guy, and all around go-to guy, at Allen, Sterling & Lothrup in Falmouth. Until last week, it had been really hot and unusually dry for weeks in Maine. If you didn't think to water your lawn, it likely got pretty brown and maybe even crunchy. The first thing you'd think to do about that is grab a hose and soak the grass down to its roots, but Brannigan says not so fast.

"Right now if they are completely brown, I would not do anything. Your grass does go dormant for a reason. It’s doing it to protect itself and you want to leave it," Brannigan said. "You don’t want to bring it out of dormancy and then let it go dormant again and then bring it back again. That will stress it more than anything. If your lawn has gone dormant, let it remain dormant until about the middle of August and then, when you do your over seeding, you should start your watering again."

Not everyone's lawn is completely brown; some may shows signs of life but they are definitely stressed. So what then?

"If your lawn is green, keep watering it and doing what you’ve been doing," Brannigan says.

In Maine, we have to grow cool season grasses so they will survive the winter. However, those varieties hate the heat and often need help to make it through the summer season. It's also why you should reseed every two years and the perfect time to do that is mid-August. But here's the rub, you need to kill the weeds now.

Brannigan says, "There needs to be some time between using weed killer, and putting down new seeds, or they won't take."  So now is the perfect time to get out there and weed. Pulling them out by hand is best organic way to deal with them, but with a big lawn, you can't always do that.  There are a few organic weed killers that won't hurt the grass, but you need to spot spray them.

Next week, we'll talk with Brannigan about that process of aerating, over-seeding and fertilizing your lawns just a few weeks from now.

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