Posted by Kathy Wilder on Thu, Sep 02, 2010
The time to seed fescue is fast approaching! All you folks in 
Northwest Arkansas, Memphis, Huntsville, and Tulsa, get ready to seed fescue in those bare areas in the shade, or to overseed your existing fescue in September. Overseeding is an important part of lawn care for anyone with shade areas.
Mid-September to mid-October is the optimum time for seeding fescue. Fescue is a cool season grass and its growing season starts in September. If you want it to look really good this fall and next spring, you must start planning now. Even though it’s still okay to seed in October, we highly recommend September, because you never know what the weather will do, and seeding in the pouring rain is next to impossible.
We offer fall aeration and overseeding of fescue in our following service areas. Please feel free to call us or your lawn tech for a free quote, or just email us and we’ll get you a price.
Tulsa, OK – Huntsville, Al – Memphis, TN – Springdale, AR
If you’re a do-it-yourself kind of person, see our step-by-step instructions for seeding fescue. 
4 important points:
- Even if your fescue looks good now, it still needs overseeded. All of our service areas (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennesee, Alabama) are in a transition zone, meaning it’s too hot for fescue. You must overseed it every fall to keep it looking beautiful.
- You cannot just throw some seed on the ground and expect good results. The seed must be incorporated into the soil, which is why we aerate when we seed.
- Seeding in the fall is for cool season grass ONLY and for shade areas ONLY.
- Bermuda, St. Augustine, and zoysia never need overseeding, because they spread.
More info :
Fairway Lawns Fall Aeration and Overseeding service
About Fescue Seeding
Do-it-yourself Fescue Seeding
Posted by Kathy Wilder on Mon, Aug 30, 2010
How can we think about winter when it’s 90+ degrees outside? Because we know that what you do now can affect how your lawn looks next spring when it emerges from a freezing winter. And we just want to give you a friendly reminder about that.
Water, water, water! Many people have kind of given up on 
watering this year. It’s so hot, and everything’s all burned up, and what’s the point? Winter's right around the corner!
But the fact that it’s going to be winter soon is the point here. Dry grass and dry roots, thinning grass, drought stressed turf, and damaged turf (like from army worms in Memphis this year, leaf hoppers in Huntsville, or diseases like brown patch in Little Rock) are much more likely to sustain winterkill than healthy, irrigated turf. Watering now will help your lawn recover and become stronger going into winter.
Your lawn needs water year round. When the cold temperatures and the drying winds come, your lawn is in peril if it’s dry to begin with. Watering now will help insure that your lawn will green up early and nicely in the spring. Be prepared! Read our page on winterkill and winter damage to bermuda.
Winterkill in bermuda grass
Posted by Kathy Wilder on Wed, Aug 25, 2010
Time and again, we hear “Why do I have bare spots in my lawn” or “What can I do about the bare areas?”
If the bare area is under a tree, and you have a warm season grass like bermuda, zoysia, or St. Augustine that thinned out and disappeared as the shade area grew larger, see our page on Shade Solutions.
If it’s not in the shade, you probably have a soil compaction problem.
Ever notice how the ground under a swing set is bare? It’s not because little feet have been rubbing off the grass, it’s because little feet have stomped on it so much that grass can’t grow there. The soil is so compacted that there’s no space in the soil for roots. In areas like this, weeds won’t even grow.
Any heavy traffic area will be compacted without frequent aeration. Do you have dogs in the back yard? Is there a bare trail along the edge of the fence where they run? Or a bare area in the corner where they lay? Are kids constantly trooping in and out of the gate?
If you have kids and dogs or other traffic that constantly hits the same place day in and day out, you will always have a problem. Frequent mechanical aeration (or our liquid aeration, Sup-R-Soil) may help if you have a durable warm season grass like bermuda, fescue or St. Augustine. Fescue, on the other hand, just can’t take the traffic.
But, more than likely, if the action causing the bare areas does not change, then the bare areas will stay there. To get rid of the bare spots, you have to get rid of the traffic. Sad, but true…
Assuming you aren’t getting rid of the kids and dogs, you could lay paving stones in a high traffic area, say, around a gate. Obviously, you don’t want concrete or rock where your dogs lay or your kids play. My dogs, Minnie and Skippy, say “What’s a few bare areas when you have US!!
Her accomplice.
Little dog responsible for bare spots.
Posted by Kathy Wilder on Thu, Aug 19, 2010
Our branch manager in Memphis, Stuart, says that army worms 
are invading! Greg, our branch manager in Birmingham confirmed that they’re having a problem with them also. And yesterday, James, our branch manager in Tulsa, told me they’ve seen 2 cases of them. This is really bad news! Army worms can munch their way across your lawn pretty much overnight and leave a raggedy mess behind as they move on to the next lawn.
What we’re seeing now are Fall Armyworms, so named because they don’t reach the northern states until fall. They are caterpillars that turn into moths. The latin name is Spodoptera frugipeda. They overwinter in Florida and Texas, where they lay eggs. When the larvae hatch, they eat for awhile, turn into moths and head north to lay more eggs. Mature caterpillars are about 1 ½ inches long. The farther south you are, the more generations of armyworms you’ll see in a summer. In Florida, armyworms are the most damaging pest to corn crops.
We have seen fall armyworms in all of our markets at one time or 
another, usually following periods of drought. Sometimes, they show up in just a few lawns, and other times they can cause considerable damage in very little time. About 10 years ago, armyworms moved into Tulsa in huge numbers! There were so many caterpillars, it looked like the lawns were moving!
Fortunately, armyworms aren’t difficult to kill. We recommend a liquid insecticide like Sevin. However, bear in mind that you may see several generations, so you may need to apply it more than once. If you don’t want to mess with that, ask your lawn tech for a quote to spray your lawn for you.
The real danger of armyworms is that they can damage your lawn at a time when drought and high temperatures are also a problem. If they chew up your fescue lawn, it will not recover and you will have to reseed this fall (all fescue should be overseeded each fall anyway, but it will look bad until then.) If you have a bermuda, zoysia, or St. Augustine lawn, it may not have enough time to recover before the winter, depending on the amount of damage. Thin or stressed turf is much more susceptible to winterkill than healthy, thick turf. If your grass doesn’t recover completely before the winter, it may be further damaged by cold temperatures, freezing and thawing, ice and snow, etc. And THAT will show up next spring when it doesn’t green up.
So, if you see ’em, spray ‘em. The sooner the better! And if your bermuda is damaged, water, fertilize, and mow frequently to try to get it fully recovered before fall.
Channel 3 in Memphis reports on the armyworm invasion with a short video that will give you a good look at these critters.
Posted by Kathy Wilder on Mon, Aug 16, 2010
You may have noticed some of your trees dropping leaves or maybe the leaves are just brown at this point. Lack of rain and 
100+ temperatures are leaving their mark.
The first trees to be affected are those that love water and those with little leaves. River birch and other birches, cedars, dawn redwoods, cypress trees, etc. are all gasping for water. Even large native trees like oaks are succumbing. A recent UPI article points out that the trees in your yard are at a distinct disadvantage because their root growth is limited to your yard in a way that would not occur in nature.
Another significant detriment to your trees’ health is the fact that we do stuff to our landscape that isn’t really good for our trees. We rake up the leaves which, in the forest, would have rotted and provided natural fertilization. Sometimes we weed-eat around them, damaging the bark at the base. Sometimes we plant trees in our yard that we like, even though they are not native to our area, and not suited to our climate. People even plant them wrong – too shallow or too deep. We’ve even seen trees that were planted with the root ball containment still intact – burlap or nylon or wire.
Many trees are planted much too close to the house – for some reason, people seem to plant beautiful upright Japanese maples in their flowerbeds, right next to their houses. These can get 30’ tall -- where do you think the roots go? (If you want a Japanese maple in the flowerbed, look for a semidwarf or weeping variety.)
And yet another factor to consider is the cold winter we had and 
what kind of freeze damage the trees sustained. Trees react slowly to freeze damage, and it may just now be showing up, in that the mechanisms it possesses to move water and nutrients through itself are not working.
When a tree is not at peak health, it is open to all kinds of misery – insect infestation, diseases, and drought stress.
As the UPI article points out, some are already gone. But, if you have a tree dropping leaves, the only hope for it is lots of water. Watering a tree isn’t anything like watering a lawn. You have to really soak it. You need to get the water down one and a half to two feet into the soil. Use a sprinkler, or just turn your hose on low, put it down under the drip line, and just leave it there. If you notice water running off the lawn, not being absorbed, stop watering until the water is absorbed, and then resume. Rocky, sandy soil will absorb water more quickly than clay soil. Be careful not to put the hose right at the base of the trunk – the roots aren’t there, and watering at the trunk could give you disease problems.
When you have the soil moistened to a 1 ½ - 2 foot depth, then you’re okay to water normally, which means watering deeply, once, twice or 3 times per month, depending on the kind of trees you have. Cypress or birch will need more water, while drought-hardy trees like Chinese pistache or hackberry will need less.
Phytosphere has a more in-depth article on watering trees.
Note: to keep your trees healthy and give them a better chance to withstand drought, winter damage, insects and diseases, be sure to fertilize them! We offer a tree and shrub program that includes both fertilization and insect & disease spraying. If you just want a couple applications, choose the early spring and the fall fertilizations. If you’re a DIY kinda person, fertilize before leaf out in the spring and again in the fall, after the leaves have fallen.
On a final note: does anyone know a rain dance?
This large oak tree in front of our office has heat stress on the left side, possibly because it's even hotter next to the pavement and traffic on that side!
Posted by Kathy Wilder on Wed, Aug 11, 2010
Bob, our branch manager in Huntsville, AL, reports a leafhopper 
infestation in Huntsville. He says you can walk through the grass on a lawn, and they hop out in big clouds.
Leafhoppers are tiny little insects that suck the juice out of grass or plant leaves, rather like chinch bugs do. When they pierce the blade of grass, they also inject a toxin, and the yellowed or bleached-out patches left in their wake are referred to as “hopper burn.” Unfortunately, the damage looks very much like heat and drought stress, so most people figure it’s just a matter of not watering enough.
Leafhoppers are mostly considered a nuisance insect in lawns, but are capable of substantial crop damage. However, on a weakened lawn or a new lawn, they can cause considerable damage, also. Given the 100+ temps we’ve had, many of the lawns in our service areas are stressed and weakened.
If you notice yellowed spots that aren’t responding to watering, take a stroll through your lawn and see if you notice a lot of tiny bugs hopping everywhere. If little clouds of them rise up, you might have a problem. If you’re a Fairway Lawns customer, you might want to check with your tech to verify the problem – not only does leaf hopper damage look like drought stress, it can also mimic some disease problems.
Fairway Lawns offers an insecticide application to take care of leafhoppers, or you can buy a pesticide like Sevin. Liquid Sevin is readily available in a bottle you can attach to your hose to apply easily. Leafhoppers have 3-4 life cycles throughout the summer, so you may have to apply insecticide more than once.
For such tiny bugs, leafhoppers are actually fascinating and some of them are very cute! There are more species of leafhoppers than there are of birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals combined, and new ones are being discovered every day. They are found on every continent, in every conceivable type of landscape from rain forests to the arctic tundra. Leafhopper fossils have been found dating back 125 millions years. Yow! The University of Illinois has an excellent site on leafhoppers created by C. H. Dietrich, Illinois Natural History Survey.
Posted by Kathy Wilder on Mon, Aug 09, 2010
Hot enough for ya? (Don’t you just want to smack people who say that? You don’t? ….okay, maybe I’m just grouchy ‘cuz it’s SO HOT.)
Heat stress (combined with drought stress,) is upon us, and high temperatures are turning lawns brown all over our service area. If you look on the side of the road and at neighborhood entrances that don’t have sprinkler systems, you can see what your lawn would look like if you didn’t water it at all – completely brown!
We are definitely seeing some crunchy lawns! Should you water more, or water more often? The answer is YES. Water, water, water.
But if you didn’t water, or you can’t water, or you don’t want a big water bill, then what? Is the grass dead? Well, if you have a warm season grass like bermuda, St. Augustine or zoysia, it’s not dead, it’s just gone into premature dormancy. It’s taking a little nap. It’ll be fine later, when the rains come and the temperatures come down. Or, if you do decide to water heavily, it will come back before then.
If it’s fescue, and you haven’t been watering, it’s probably dead. When fescue is crunchy in 100+ weather, it’s a pretty good bet that it’s not coming back.
But mid-September to mid-October is fescue overseeding time, so that can be remedied soon enough.
We’ve seen lawns equipped with automatic sprinklers that still have brown spots – one or two sprinkler heads may be aimed wrong, or there’s just an area they’re missing. It doesn’t take long to show up when it’s been 104 degrees for a week. This is a good time to check that and fix it!
Try to water in the morning when the winds are low and the temperatures are a mere 80+. You’ll have less evaporation and get more results from your watering dollar. Lightly spray your fescue in the heat of the afternoon, to cool it down – this goes for your flowerbeds as well. Remember, deep watering every two or 3 days is more effective than 15 minutes every day. But a quick spray will cool things off.
A word about heat exhaustion: ANYONE is susceptible, even our guys who work out in this heat every day. So if you’re pushing a mower, or cleaning out the gutters, or whatever, pay attention to your body! Hopefully, everyone has sense enough to drink a lot of water, but that’s no guarantee, especially when we have high humidity. If you suddenly feel a chill, or get dizzy, you’ve had enough – go inside!
Posted by Wilson Kanaday on Sun, Jul 25, 2010
In our business, we print out tickets for our techs to go out and treat lawns. If you’re a customer of ours (or of any lawn care
company’s) you know this, because we leave the invoice half on your door. But what you don’t see is the other half, which tells the lawn tech everything he needs to know before he does your lawn – what kind of grass you have, whether we treat your whole yard or just the front, how big your lawn is, etc.
When we get the guy’s half of the ticket back in the office, we post what was done in the computer. Many times, the guys make their own notes which we also put in the computer, such as “shut gate – bunny in back” or “4 Great Danes!!!” or “gate code - 1234” or anything they deem important enough to know in case someone else does the lawn while they’re on vacation.
Occasionally, I’ll run across a ticket that says “KILL THE NUTSEDGE!!!” It’s never “kill the nutsedge.” No, it’s always “KILL THE NUTSEDGE!!!”
They are so vehement about nutsedge, because it’s the weed most likely to drive a homeowner nuts (no pun intended, really…)
Nutsedge is a paler green than bermuda grass and grows so quickly that one or two days after you mow, it’s up higher than your bermuda. Looks terrible! Nutsedge is also called “nut grass” or “water grass”. It is a sedge type grass that grows from a nutlet in the ground. The nut in the ground never really goes away. The amount of rainfall we have determines the amount of nutsedge you see.
Nutsedge is most noticeable in ditches or any place where water stands frequently – it will also show up in your flowerbeds. However, with the amount of recent rainfall we’ve had in some of our service areas like Tulsa and Springdale, nutsedge has become a big problem. Our grassy weed applications help, but it’s an ongoing battle. Most of the products we use must be applied twice within 7-10 days to be effective. When our schedule is thwarted, due to customers rescheduling, or more rain, we have to start again.
If you’re a do-it-yourself-er, first understand the difference between “selective” and “non-selective” when looking for a product. Non-selective will kill whatever you spray and usually contains glyphosate – Round-Up is one such product. Be very careful if you use RoundUp, because it will kill anything actively growing. It will kill nutsedge, but we think it’s best reserved for killing weeds in gravel areas, or weeds in the cracks of your driveway. You don’t want to kill your grass!
Selective herbicides are designed to target certain weeds. Products containing halosulfuron (like Sedgehammer) will control nutsedge and are best used when the plant is young. They are more effective when a nonionic surfactant is added. We use products like Certainty (containing sulfosulfuron,) which are available only to professionals. MSMA also works, but is more effective on yellow nutsedge than purple nutsedge. (Yes, there are two varieties of nutsedge…)
Please bear in mind that the spring pre-emergent weed control applications do not control summer grassy weeds like nutsedge, dallisgrass, fescue clumps, etc. Nutsedge doesn’t even show up until late April. As far as pre-emergents for nutsedge, there are some on the market. I believe Casoron (containing dichlobenil) is the only one available to homeowners, and it must be applied before the plants emerge. Other nutsedge pre-emergents available to professionals are Pennant, and Freehand. Both are very expensive and testing within our markets has so far proved too unreliable on a consistent basis for us to offer a nutsedge pre-emergent application.
So, if you’re having a problem with nutsedge, it’s likely due to the abundant rainfall we’ve had. If you buy a product to use yourself, be sure to follow the directions to the letter. Many products for nutsedge control will cause temporary yellowing to surrounding turf, so just expect it! It will look bad, but after a few mowings, it will be gone! (In flowerbeds, it’s best to just pull the nutsedge.)
Most of the grassy weed products we use may cause temporary yellowing. We know you don’t like to see that, but it’s necessary to get rid of the weeds. Grassy weeds are, after all, grass, so it’s no surprise that our material will yellow the grass in your lawn.
Posted by Wilson Kanaday on Mon, Jul 19, 2010
Frequently, customers call us because they have mushrooms in 
their lawns, and they think that we can get rid of them. As David Fischer, mycology expert extraordinaire says: “You can’t get rid of lawn mushrooms without getting rid of the lawn.”
I say: “Got mushrooms? Good for you!”
Mushrooms are actually the fruit of beneficial fungi that are always present in your lawn. These fungi help with the breakdown of organic matter which makes nutrients available to your grass. This fruit that is known as a mushroom only appears when weather conditions are just right – damp, rainy, cloudy, humid conditions. So if we have a stretch of rainy weather, and we don’t see the sun for awhile, you can bet you’ll be seeing some mushrooms.
Mushrooms release tiny spores that blow around until they land in another good spot, where they germinate and send out long, tiny filaments calls hyphae. The hyphae decompose fallen leaves, sticks and other detritus occurring in nature. One hypha is too tiny to see with the naked eye, but digging in the soil, you might see a bundle of them, a thread-like mass called mycelium (like mycology – the study of fungi.)
After it has matured sufficiently, which could take years, the mycelium produces the fruit. So, enjoy these little wonders of nature, because you won’t see them very often.
If you are concerned about small children or pets eating them, just pick them and throw them away. NEVER assume a mushroom is not poisonous, because even experts can be fooled sometimes!
If you’d like to learn more about mushrooms, or just want to look at the neat pictures (over 1,000) of numerous varieties, visit David Fischer’s fabulous
American Mushrooms website
Posted by Kathy Wilder on Mon, Jul 12, 2010
Holy Moly! Are moles tearing up your lawn? Have you tried numerous solutions and nothing works? Can we help? 
Unfortunately, we have no application that will get rid of your furry, tunneling nemeses! You will hear time and again that killing grubs will send the moles fleeing, because grubs are their food source. Grubs are one of their food sources, but they mainly eat earthworms, and you don’t want to harm earthworms, because they are completely beneficial to the soil.
We do offer a Preventive Grub Control treatment, but only because sometimes homeowners will have grubs in their lawn in excess, and the grubs will actually eat the roots of their grass. Moles, on the other hand, don’t eat your grass – they are carnivores. They may dislodge flower bulbs and plant roots by tunneling, and they most certainly leave a mess behind, not to mention an obstacle course where you can step into a tunnel if you’re not careful.
Unfortunately, the best way to control moles is with traps. Not what you wanted to hear, right?
Also unfortunately, the best-kept lawns seem to be the ones with the worst mole problems. I guess if I was a mole, I would most certainly prefer a nice lawn - much easier to tunnel through and more yummy critters in there.
The University of Arkansas has an excellent article on moles that will explain to you why you should not waste your money on poison peanuts and mole bait (in case you’re getting desperate enough to consider that) and which traps really work. Several years ago, a gentleman told me he was so sick of the moles in his yard that he was going to sit on the back porch with his shotgun and blast as many of those suckers as he could before the neighbors called the police. I guess there’s a breaking point for everybody!
BTW – I learned a new word while reading the article – predation. I had to look it up. It means “a relationship between two species of animal in a community, in which one hunts, kills and eats the other.” Cool, huh? (Sic your dog on them…)