Lawn care for Forest Hills yards

What shade and old hardwoods do to a lawn

Most of Forest Hills sits under a hardwood canopy that was there long before the houses were. Oaks and hickories close over the street in summer, and the grass underneath gets a few hours of real sun a day if it is lucky. Fescue will live in that, but it lives thin. The blades stretch for light, the roots stay shallow, and by the middle of a hot week the turf under the drip line is the first thing to go pale.

The mistake we see most on a shaded lot is cutting it too short. A short cut on grass that is already starving for light takes off the part of the blade doing the work, and the lawn answers by thinning out further until the bare clay shows through. So we run the deck high on these yards and take a little off the top each visit instead of scalping it once a month and calling it done.

Shade also keeps the ground damp. Dew sits on a north-facing yard here until late morning, and grass that stays wet through a humid Tennessee July is grass that gets brown patch. We change direction on the passes so the wheels are not tracking the same wet line week after week, and we keep the blade sharp. A dull blade tears the tip instead of cutting it, the torn end browns off, and that is an open door for fungus on turf that is already stressed.

• Cut height raised on shaded turf
• Mowing direction changed so wheels do not rut
• Trimmer kept off tree bark and surface roots
• Drive and road edges cut clean every visit
• Mulch pulled back off the trunk flare

Hillside lots and where the rain ends up

Forest Hills is hills, which is the part people forget when they picture a big yard. Lots run up a ridge or drop away behind the house, driveways switch back, and the soil under the grass is Middle Tennessee clay sitting on limestone. Water does not soak into that. It runs, and it takes the loose topsoil down the slope with it, so the high side of a yard goes thin and hard while the bottom stays soft enough to hold a footprint.

That soft bottom is where a mower does damage if nobody is paying attention. Roll a machine across saturated clay after a spring storm and you leave ruts that stay all summer, and the wheel tracks turn into channels for the next rain. So on a wet week we mow the top of the property and come back for the low ground once it has drained, or we cut the whole thing on foot where the pitch is steep enough that a rider would tear it.

The other slope problem is the edge. Long drives here run down to the pike, and the strip where the lawn meets the pavement is where the runoff concentrates. Leave it alone and the grass pulls back off the asphalt while gravel works its way into what is left. From the road that reads as a ragged brown line down the whole frontage. We edge that seam every visit so the turf has a clean face to grow against, and we keep clippings out of the ditch line rather than washing them into it.

Weeds and mulch beds under a canopy

Thin turf is an invitation. Anywhere the grass has given up under a tree, something else moves in: chickweed and henbit through the cool months, then nutsedge and crabgrass in the low wet spots once the heat arrives. Pulling the tops off in July does nothing. Weed control on a yard like this is a timing job, done before the seed germinates in the spring and again when the fall weeds are small, and it works better on turf that is being mowed properly the rest of the year.

Beds here are usually up against mature trees, and mature trees drop a lot of leaf litter. Mulch that gets topped up year after year without anyone checking underneath ends up piled against the trunk, and that is how you rot the bark on an oak somebody's grandparents planted. We pull it back off the flare and keep the depth even so rain still reaches the roots. Then we cut a clean line where the bed meets the grass, because a bed with no edge migrates into the lawn a little more every year.

None of that is complicated work. It is just work somebody has to actually look at, which is what most of the reviews on the Google listing come back to. Keith Setler wrote, "Really detailed attention to every inch of our yard and even took care of things we didn’t ask for." That is the standard we hold on a Forest Hills property, where the lot is big enough that the corner nobody sees from the kitchen window is the corner that gets skipped.

Getting a price in Forest Hills

Estimates are free, and the way to get one is to call (615) 987-9982 or send the form on this page with your street and roughly what you want handled. On a wooded lot the price depends on how much of it is actually turf and how steep the mowing gets, and whether the beds come with it changes things again. That is why it gets walked first and written down, so you are looking at a real number and not a guess over the phone.