Lawn Care and Mowing in Madison, Mississippi

A weekly visit is more than a mow. Your crew mows at the right height for your grass type, edges every hard surface, string-trims around beds, fences and trees, and blows the drive, walks and patio clean before leaving. Clippings get mulched back into the turf unless they're heavy enough to smother it. Then we bag them. We alternate mowing patterns so the grass doesn't lean or rut, and we raise the deck in the heat of summer so the roots stay shaded.

Every visit includes a walk of the property. If we see a sprinkler head that isn't popping up, a bed holding water, a shrub getting eaten or a patch of turf thinning out, we note it and tell you what we'd do about it. The mower is the easy part. Keeping the property healthy for the next ten years is the job.

Almost every lawn in Madison County is a warm-season grass: Bermuda on sunny lots and newer builds, Zoysia on higher-end landscapes, centipede on older properties and shadier yards, and St. Augustine in a few spots near the Reservoir.

Each one wants a different feeding schedule and a different mowing height, and all of them go dormant in winter and green up in spring. Our fertilization program is built around that cycle.

Pre-emergent goes down in late winter, before soil temperatures reach the mid-fifties and crabgrass and goosegrass germinate, and again in early fall for winter annuals like poa annua and henbit.

Fertilizer goes down while the grass is actively growing, roughly April through September, in amounts matched to the grass type so Bermuda gets what it can use and centipede doesn't get burned. Broadleaf weeds like dollarweed, clover and Virginia buttonweed get spot-treated as they show up, not blanket-sprayed. The fall feeding, before dormancy, does the most for how fast the lawn greens up in March.

The soil around Madison is heavy Yazoo clay under a thin layer of topsoil. It holds nutrients, but it also holds water and packs down hard. A soil test every couple of years tells us whether the pH has drifted, which is common on lots graded during construction, and whether the lawn needs lime or sulfur before more fertilizer will do any good.

Compaction is the quiet problem on most Jackson-metro lawns. Clay, foot traffic and mowers pack the ground until roots can't push through it, and the turf thins out no matter how much you feed it. Core aeration pulls plugs of soil out of the lawn so air, water and fertilizer can reach the roots. We aerate warm-season lawns in late spring once they're fully green, and again in early fall for lawns that took a beating over summer.

Bermuda and Zoysia build thatch, a layer of dead stems between the green grass and the soil. A thin layer is fine. More than half an inch and water starts running off instead of soaking in. Dethatching in late spring opens that layer up. For thin spots, we overseed after aeration while the soil is warm, which is why the fall window through mid-October is the best time to do it in Madison.

New builds in Gluckstadt and Madison, backyards torn up by a pool or patio project, and lawns too far gone to recover all end up in the same place: new sod. We grade the area so water moves away from the house, pull the old turf and rocks, till and amend the top few inches, and lay the sod tight with staggered seams.

We lay Bermuda, Zoysia and centipede, and we'll tell you which one fits your sun and foot traffic. You get a watering plan for the first month, because most sod fails in the first two weeks, when it dries out before the roots knit.

An irrigation system that's quietly broken costs more than one that's off. A stuck head floods one corner and starves the rest. A cracked valve runs all night. We repair heads, nozzles, valves, wiring and controllers, adjust coverage so the driveway stops getting watered, and set seasonal schedules. Before the first freeze, usually late November around here, we check the backflow and drain exposed lines so a split pipe doesn't show up in January.

Offices along Highland Colony Parkway, churches, HOA common areas, medical buildings on Lakeland Drive and small retail centers are on our commercial route. If the grounds are the first thing a customer sees, they shouldn't be the thing you worry about.

We mow it, feed it, fix the sprinklers and build the beds, so you're not chasing four contractors. And if your yard doesn't need anything, we'll say so.