Murfreesboro yards kept sharp all season

What a Murfreesboro summer does to grass

Most yards around Murfreesboro are fescue, and fescue is a cool season grass being asked to live through a Middle Tennessee July. It grows hard in spring, then the heat sits on it, the clay underneath dries out and shrinks, and by August the whole lawn looks tired even when nobody did anything wrong. Cutting it short in that stretch is the fastest way to lose it. Taller grass shades its own roots and keeps the soil under it cooler, so we raise the deck when the heat comes and leave it there.

Crabgrass is the other half of it. It does not push into thick turf, it moves into the bare spots the heat opened up, and every thin edge along a driveway or a curb is a place for it to start. Same with nutsedge in the low corners of a yard where the clay holds water after a storm. That is why the mowing and the weed control are the same job here. A lawn kept thick has less room for either one to get started.

So the week to week matters more than any one visit. Grass that gets cut on a set day at the right height holds up through the hot stretch a lot better than a yard that gets knocked down whenever somebody remembers it. We keep a route through Murfreesboro so the same person is looking at your grass each time and can tell you it is starting to thin on the west side before it goes bare.

• Deck raised for the summer heat, not scalped
• Edges cut back off drives and curbs
• Crabgrass and nutsedge treated where the turf thinned
• Clippings blown off walks and porches
• Beds mulched and the edge cut in by hand

Sod over graded clay in the new subdivisions

A lot of Murfreesboro is new. The subdivisions out toward Blackman and Barfield went up on ground that got scraped flat first, and when a builder does that the topsoil goes with it. The sod arrives on top of graded clay, it looks perfect on closing day, and about a year later the roots are still sitting in that top inch because there is nowhere good to go. Grass like that dries out fast, browns before your neighbor's does, and needs a different plan than an older yard with real soil under it.

The beds around a new house tell the same story. Builder beds get a thin skim of mulch over plastic or fabric, the shrubs go in tight against the brick, and the grade often runs the wrong way so water sits at the foundation after a hard spring rain. Once that mulch breaks down it stops holding anything back and every weed seed that blew in over the winter has a place to sit. We pull the beds back to a clean edge, get the old material out of the way, and put fresh mulch down at a depth that actually smothers.

Lot lines in those neighborhoods are close, and the water between two houses has one path, the swale the builder cut. Mow it wrong and you rut it. Let the grass go thin in it and the next storm takes soil down to the sidewalk and leaves a bar of mud across it. We watch that strip on a new build the same way we watch the strip between the sidewalk and the curb, because both are the first parts of a yard to fail and the last parts anybody looks at.

Big trees on the older Murfreesboro streets

Closer in, off East Main and around the square, the houses are older and the trees are the reason people bought there. Mature oaks and maples over a front yard change what grass can do underneath them. Less light means thinner turf no matter how well it is fed, surface roots make a level cut hard, and the soil under a big canopy stays dry because the tree drinks first. A yard like that is a shade yard. It gets cut higher and kept clear of whatever is smothering it, and nobody should expect the thickness of a lawn in full sun.

Fall is the part people underestimate. A big canopy drops enough leaf on an older yard to mat it down, and wet leaf left over the winter kills grass in patches that show up in March looking like something ate the lawn. The walks in those neighborhoods are old brick or narrow poured concrete with grass creeping over the lip, so the edging matters more than it does out in a newer subdivision. Getting that line back is most of what makes an older yard look kept.

There is a mix in those blocks too. Some of the houses near the university are rentals, and a rental yard that has been let go for a season does not come back on one cut. It comes back on a hard first visit and then a normal schedule after that, and it is worth saying out loud before the work starts so nobody is surprised by what the first one costs against the ones that follow.

Getting a price in Murfreesboro

Call (615) 987-9982 or send the form and tell us the street you are on in Murfreesboro. Estimates are free, and you get the price in writing before anybody starts, with what is included on a cut and what would be a separate job like mulch or a bed cleanup. We are based in Smyrna and Murfreesboro is a short run down the road, so it is an easy yard to keep on the route. If you would rather have it looked at before you decide anything, we will come look at it.