U.S. Lawns - Round Rock

The turf failures property managers see in July and August usually trace back to mowing decisions made in May.

A lot of commercial turf gets cut shorter than it should be, and the lawn pays for it once temperatures climb. Cutting too low forces the plant to spend energy regrowing leaf tissue instead of building the root depth it needs to handle summer heat and foot traffic. By the time the turf starts thinning or losing ground to w**ds, the underlying cause has been in place for two months, and the remaining options are either irrigating through it or accepting how the property looks until fall.

For most cool-season turf, three to four inches is the right cutting height, and no single pass should remove more than a third of the blade. That range keeps the root system deep enough to carry the lawn through the months when the property gets the most use and the most attention from tenants.

Mowing height is one of those details that's easy to overlook on a maintenance scope, but it tells you more about how the lawn will perform in summer than almost anything else on the service plan.