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Mowing your lawn is an essential maintenance task that you need to do on a regular basis to keep it looking neat and manicured. However, mowing incorrectly can harm your grass! To avoid damaging your turf, make sure you rotate your mowing patterns every time you cut the grass. This means cutting your lawn in different patterns each time in order to prevent ruts and compacted soil. Also, it's important to adjust the deck height of your mower based on the specific grass type that you have on your property in Virginia to ensure it's cut to the ideal length. Finally, resist the urge to bag up those grass clippings after mowing. Leaving them on your lawn will return vital nutrients back to your soil.

Not Rotating Your Mowing Patterns Every Time You Cut the Grass

The first mistake you want to avoid when mowing your lawn is not changing up your mowing patterns each time. When you follow the same direction every time, it compacts the soil and causes ruts to form, which hinders airflow, water penetration, and nutrient uptake. As a result, it weakens and stresses your grass, making it more susceptible to diseases and pests. To prevent this from happening, rotate your mowing pattern by 90-degree increments each session, whether you're cutting perpendicular or parallel to the ground with lines. This way, it stays well-maintained and has optimal access to everything it needs.

Not Adjusting Your Lawn Mower's Deck Height to Your Turf Type

Another crucial aspect ...

Whenever weeds begin to take over a yard, it can be frustrating for the property owner to try and figure out what happened. Usually, there are certain causes that lawn care professionals can pinpoint. Certain weeds such as clover may grow because of other underlying reasons.

Here at Patriot Lawn and Landscape, we help you combat clover and other weeds through our lawn care and health services in areas such as Haymarket, Bristow, Manassas, and nearby areas. Learn more about clover and the reasons it may be in your yard.

Clover may be cheap to grow but has several disadvantages.

Some property owners love the idea of clover lawns. Clover is cheap to grow, resistant to droughts, and doesn't require fertilizer applications to thrive. However, other property owners try to avoid it because of disadvantages such as:

• It stains more easily than other kinds of grass do
• It's a short-lived perennial that requires reseeding every couple of years
• On its own, it isn't durable enough for areas that experience heavy traffic

Rather than a functional and aesthetically-pleasing groundcover, most people view clover as an annoying weed that invades their lawn.

Your soil requires aeration and seeding services.

Clover thrives off of nitrogen. It takes in this essential nutrient from the air rather than from the soil. Because clover doesn't need nitrogen from the soil it's growing in, it tends to grow in lawns that don't have a lot of...