Lawn care on Lebanon's thin soil

What glade soil does to a Lebanon lawn

Lebanon sits on limestone, and in a lot of Wilson County yards the rock is not far under your feet. You can feel it when you push a spade in and hit stone at ankle depth. Thin soil over rock holds very little water, so a lawn that looks fine in May can go straw colored across the high spots by late July while the low corner of the same yard is still green. Same grass, different ground underneath it.

That is why cutting height matters more here than people think. Take a fescue lawn down close in the middle of summer and you scalp the crowns on every high spot, which is exactly where the soil is thinnest and the plant has the least root to fall back on. Those spots go brown, then they stay brown, and by the time fall comes around the bare ground has been claimed by crabgrass and whatever else blew in. A tall cut shades its own roots and holds moisture in the ground longer.

So the crew reads the yard before it reads a calendar. We set the deck height for the grass in front of us, keep the blades sharp because rock and gravel take an edge off fast, and change the direction of the cut so the wheels are not pressing the same line into soft ground every visit. Keith Setler put it this way in his review: "Really detailed attention to every inch of our yard and even took care of things we didn’t ask for."

• Cut height set for thin soil over rock
• Blades kept sharp, gravel dulls an edge fast
• Cut direction changed so wheels do not rut
• Trimmed close along walks and bed edges
• Clippings blown off the drive before we leave

Older yards near the square, new ground beyond

The streets around the courthouse square carry some of the oldest houses in town, and the yards match them: big maples and oaks that have been there longer than anyone living on the street, tight lot lines, and a lawn that spends half the day in shade. Grass gives up under a mature shade tree. People keep throwing seed at the ring around the trunk every fall and watching it thin out again, when what that ring actually wants is mulch and a clean edge.

Out past that, on ground that was pasture and hay field not long ago, the newer subdivisions are a different animal. The topsoil came off when the pad went in, sod went down over packed clay and rock fill, and the roots under that sod are shallow because there is nowhere for them to go. Those lawns look perfect the first spring, then they hit the first real dry stretch and fall apart in patches, usually along the driveway and the sunny side of the house where the fill is hardest.

Both kinds of yard get mowed by the same crew on the same route, but they do not get treated the same way. An old shaded lawn gets cut higher and kept clear of leaf litter so what light does reach the grass counts for something. A young lawn on builder fill gets a lighter hand and more attention to the weeds, because bare ground is what the weeds are waiting on, and there is plenty of bare ground in a new subdivision.

Weed control and mulch through a Lebanon summer

Middle Tennessee gives you a wet spring where the grass grows faster than anybody can keep up with it, then a run of heat that shuts the cool season grass down, then a warm wet fall. Weeds work that same calendar and they work it better. Crabgrass comes up when the soil warms, not when you notice it, so once you are looking at it in the yard the window to stop it has already closed and the job turns into pulling instead of preventing.

Mulch does more here than make a bed look finished. On thin soil that dries out in a week without rain, a proper depth of mulch is what keeps moisture at the roots of the shrubs, and it keeps the weed seed from finding the bare dirt it needs. What ruins it is piling it against the trunk, or laying fresh mulch straight over a bed that was never cleaned out, so everything under it comes back through by midsummer looking worse than before.

So beds get cleared and cut in before anything new goes down. Old material out, roots and rock out of the way, a hard edge cut so a heavy Tennessee thunderstorm does not float the whole bed out onto the driveway by morning. Elizabeth Earls wrote this on the Google listing about her front beds: "He cleared out our beds, took away large rock and leveled our beds to make it easier to plant and fill in the future."

Getting a price in Lebanon

Call (615) 987-9982 or send the form with the address and what you want looked at. Somebody comes out to Lebanon and walks the yard, checks the shade and where the ground turns hard, and the estimate comes back to you in writing before any work gets scheduled. The estimate is free, the same as it is for the yards down in Smyrna. If the number works for you, we get you on the route.