[caption id="attachment_5477" align="alignleft" width="540"] This photo was sent to us from Jeff Borkowski of Massachusetts, where the lawn is watered daily — contributing to the massive population of crabgrass. Ironically, this stand of crabgrass in the North looks a lot like a healthy carpet of St. Augustine or centipede grass in the South. [/caption] By this week in August EVERY YEAR almost universal aff ...

[caption id="attachment_5451" align="alignleft" width="540"] This is the appearance of a typical drought-stressed lawn in many parts of North America right now. In all likelihood, however, it will recover when the weather cools and rain returns.[/caption] As the news continues to build about the now-epic drought conditions sweeping the nation, my neighbor was outside this afternoon applying more fertilizer ...

With more than half the United States in a drought and much of the continent in warmer-than-normal conditions, the best advice for your lawn right now might be this: Ignore it. That's right. Ignore it. Don't mow. Don't water and don't fret. Sure, if you don't water the lawn it may turn brown, but that doesn't mean it's dying, it just means it's going dormant. Turning brown is a lawn's natural protection sys ...

Last Thursday, with a heat index of 105, I witnessed a sprinkler system spewing water high into the air at noontime near Washington, D.C. This morning, after more than an inch of rain yesterday, I heard my neighbors' sprinkler system go off at 5:45 a.m. in Rhode Island. And after an optimistic drought forecast offered up by the National Weather Service earlier this spring, the map, above, is beginning to lo ...