We’ve been smelling a lot of skunks in our yard lately. Typically it’s when we take the dogs out later in the evening. So today’s topic is on skunks and your lawn.
Those cute little black and white striped skunks are nocturnal animals that are naturally mild-mannered and non-aggressive. They prefer small animals and insects for dinner instead of your lawn and garden. They do occasionally visit gardens and if they do, it may be because corn or other plants are close to the ground.
Skunks can be very nice to have around because they dig up and feed on grubs and other crop-destroying insect life. However, skunks are not partial to insects. They will eat leaves, buds, grasses, grains, garbage, any fruit or berries within reach, and even small game. This is what can make them a bit of a nuisance.
Why do skunks spray?
You can smell an angry skunk from miles away. A skunk can spray you from 10 to 12 feet, sideways, up, or down, with little apparent effort. Most gardeners worry more about a skunk spraying in the garden, on the gardener, or on a pet than about a skunk chewing up their lawn and garden.
Under a skunk’s tail are a pair of ducts which, in peacetime, remain hidden, but which emit a foul ammunition when they are upset. Each of the two pouches contains enough ammunition for six rounds. After the supply is exhausted, it takes a week for the liquid to replenish.
A skunk’s warfare is purely defensive. When confronted by a menacing man or clamorous dog, skunks will try to sidestep by ambling off. This means that if you find a skunk, simply turn back and you should be fine. If pursued, skunks will turn, face their aggressor, and stamp their forefeet. This is their first warning and you should run!
The second warning comes when their tails, all but the tips, are hoisted and the spray is released. People can get sprayed when they walk through their yard in the dark or disturb a skunk while eating.
How do you know if you have skunks in your garden?
Skunks are often mistaken for raccoons, because they both have five toes. Sometimes the fifth toe is hard to see in skunk tracks. Their heels usually are not part of the tracks, and their claw marks are usually somewhat visible. Often, the best way to identify skunks is unfortunately by their odor.
If your lawn or flower bed has lots of holes in it, you may have a skunk problem. Skunks dig up the turf looking for grubs. They move around at night and dig in grassy areas, making distinct 3– to 4–inch deep holes. Skunk activity increases in the spring and then lessens naturally, so any problems may stop all on their own.
Skunks sometimes feed on corn, but they only eat the lower ears. If a corn stalk has been toppled over, the culprit is more likely a raccoon. Planting taller varieties of corn can minimize this damage.
How do you get rid of skunks?
Probably the best skunk repellent is a light. Skunks are nocturnal and their eyes are very light sensitive. A bright light or a motion sensor flood light will scare skunks away.
Most animals, including skunks, dislike the smell of citrus fruits. Place orange or lemon peels around the yard as a natural skunk repellent.
Spray a mixture of castor oil and dish-washing detergent diluted in water. Skunks find the smell offensive. Spray the area at night when the skunk is away foraging.
Predator urine (e.g. dogs) can be used to repel a skunk. These are commercially sold in garden centers.
If the skunks are in a smaller garden patch, put bars of strong–smelling soap or a room deodorizer near your garden. Skunks hate strong scents.
If nothing works, there are humane ways for professionals to trap skunks and transport them elsewhere. Often, skunk removal by trapping is the only answer, and there just isn’t a lot you can do if it is a skunk.
One of the best preventative methods is to treat your lawn so that you get rid of the skunk’s favorite snacks–insects.
What do you do if you or a pet are spayed by a skunk?
If you or your pet is sprayed by a skunk, try a mixture of 1 quart 3% hydrogen peroxide, ¼ cup of baking soda, and 2 teaspoons of liquid dish soap. Shampoo only the area sprayed by the skunk. We recommend wearing rubber gloves. Then using a sponge or washcloth, wet the area and work the solution into the skin (or fur) with your hands avoiding the eyes. Then rinse. There are also commercial skunk odor removers like Nature’s Miracle Skunk Odor Removal.
Hydrogen peroxide and baking soda convert the skunk musk into an odorless chemical, and the soap in the mixture breaks down the oily residue so the other chemicals can work.
First Response Lawn Care provides expert lawn treatment. Call us today to get started on a lawn treatment plan for your lawn.
Lawn mowing, lawn care, fertilization, seeding, sprinkler systems at First Response Lawn Care Rockwall we pretty much do it all. The best part is that we are affordable, reliable, and genuinely care about your lawn.
We are a locally owned business and our goal is to provide quality services to our community. We serve Fate, Rockwall, Royse City, Caddo Mills, Rowlett, Forney, Heath, Sachse, Wylie, Lavon, Garland and surrounding areas. We want to ensure that residents in our communities are pleased with our fair prices, and know that we are truly dedicated to high-quality customer service. Why do we care? Because we are a part of these communities!
We are easy to work with, accept all major credit cards, and we will be there when we say we will. We can handle all of your landscape needs from lawn mowing, flower bed clean-ups, and treatment for your yard to ridding your lawn of weeds and unwanted bugs. We make time for you so you can make time for your family. We are even a licensed lawn sprinkler company offering irrigation systems and repair!
Now that Summer is in full force, if you find yourself slaving over your lawn, let us take care of it for you. Professional lawn service frees up your time so you can invest it in more important things…like life!
We provide complete lawn service from our family to yours. If you are looking for a great, dependable lawn mowing service, call us today for a free quote at 214-701-7622. Ask for Shannon!
Ants are not generally considered harmful pests, but they can create havoc to turf grass not just cosmetically either. The actual health of the lawn can be compromised by an ant problem. Controlling ants in the lawn becomes important where their hill building causes root damage to grass and unsightly mounds. Lawn dwelling ants are not the stinging sort, but some species have a habit of undermining grass roots and causing large dead patches in the lawn.
The actual ant hills are another problem in the lawn. Ant hills can become large and make mowing difficult. As we all know, raking out the hills will just scatter the ant population. You could try raking frequently to reduce hardened mounds from occurring. This simple step is effective if done on a weekly basis from fall to summer, but who has the time to do that?!
Call First Response Lawn Care today and get started on an ant control treatment today!
Now that the summer temps are reaching triple digits, we need to take extra care in watering the lawn, plants and vegetable garden. We happen to notice that our tomatoes weren’t producing much, and the pepper plants looked particularly wilted recently. Veggies need water to produce, so watering the garden correctly is crucial in the hot summer especially when we are not getting enough rain. Tomatoes are especially unforgiving if they dry out, then get wet and get dried out again. This creates problems like blossom end rot. And if you start noticing cracks in your fruit, this happens when water follows a drought, causing the fruit to expand suddenly and split the skin. The only way to avoid this is to keep the soil consistently moist. We’ve put together a list of tips for watering your garden that should help in this heat!
Water your vegetables two to three times a week or more.
During really hot summer weather, watering the garden deeply and often is critical. The water needs to penetrate the soil to encourage deep roots and get away from the hot soil surface. If you aren’t using a sprinkler or drip system, put a cup or can in the garden soil and don’t stop watering until it has collected at least an inch of water. If your veggies are in containers like pots, you need to water every day during the heat because containers dry out faster than the ground. To hand-water a small plot, or pots, use a nozzle turned to the “shower” setting for gentle, rain-like watering. If water just puddles on the surface of the soil at first, move on, and come back several times to be sure the water is actually soaking in to the soil. The soil needs to be thoroughly moist.
Watch your garden for an “indicator” plant.
The first indication of a wilting plant in the garden is your dehydration indicator. When you notice a plant with droopy leaves, you need to take action. The first is usually a plant with big leaves like squash, cucumber and melon because those lose lots of moisture fast. But in our veggie garden, we noticed the peppers and tomatoes wilted first. Of course, it’s better to water consistently so that this never happens. We all have busy lives and even the attentive gardeners get caught by wilting plants in the summer months. Note that in very hot, dry, and sunny weather, the big-leafed plants will wilt a bit mid-day no matter what, but they recover quickly in the evening. We keep a watering schedule programmed in our cell phone to remind us to check the more vulnerable plants each day at some point.
Avoid wetting the plant’s leaves.
If you use a sprinkler system, it is impossible not to wet the leaves when watering the garden, so in that case, water early in the morning so that the foliage will dry early and quickly to minimize disease risk. You can put the sprinkler on a timer so that it comes on just before daybreak, when the leaves may already be wet with dew. The gardening principle here is to avoid adding to the length of time that the leaves stay wet because many diseases need moisture to thrive.
Help keep water in the ground.
Use mulch! We recommend organic mulch like chopped up leaves, finely ground bark, wheat straw or pine needles, but any mulch is better than none. Spread mulch around and under plants. This creates a barrier between the moist soil and the blazing sun. You need a 2 to 3-inch layer of mulch in hot weather. This will act as a shade cloth to keep in moisture and cool plant roots. Without mulch, the intense sun bakes the soil requiring even more watering.
If you need help reviving your lawn in the heat of the summer, call your lawn care experts First Response Lawn Care at (214) 701-7622. We serve Rockwall and surrounding cities Royse City, Fate, Rowlett, Sachse, Wylie, Lavon, Forney, Heath, Garland, and Mesquite Texas. We are here to help!
Mushrooms are actually part of a fungus that grows underground, hidden from sight. Lawn fungi and their mushrooms don’t harm a lawn. They’re actually good guys in the ecosystem of your yard, breaking down organic material into nutrients your lawn can use. When most people hear the word “mushroom,” they think of the typical umbrella-shaped one, which is sometimes called a toadstool. Common names for lawn fungus, include puffball, shaggy mane, Japanese parasol or the oddly shaped and smelly stinkhorn.
Common Causes and Solutions
Fungi living beneath lawns are usually long-lived organisms that produce mushrooms when conditions are right. The top reasons mushrooms occur are buried organic matter, high moisture and low light.
Cause: Buried organic matter
A fungus grows by breaking down organic matter. In a lawn, that organic material could be buried timber, a stump, or tree or shrub roots that remain underground after plants have been removed.
Sometimes you can hasten the material’s breakdown by applying nitrogen fertilizer. Use a readily available nitrogen source, not a slow-release one. Aim for a rate of 1/2 to 3/4 pound of actual nitrogen per 1,000 square feet of lawn. If you don’t mind disturbing your lawn, you can also try digging up the organic material.
Cause: High moisture
Periods of prolonged rain can coax mushrooms to form, as can overwatering a lawn. Heavily compacted soil and a thick thatch layer can create drainage problems, which provide ideal growing conditions for mushrooms.
Solution: While you can’t do much about overabundant rainfall, you can address lawn watering practices. Aim for deep, infrequent lawn watering, which encourages turf to develop an extensive root system. Learn tips for lawn irrigation.
For drainage issues caused by compacted soil, try aerating your lawn. If your lawn needs to be aerated, check out our services below.
My mother is an overzealous mulcher. She’s obsessed with buying 10-15 bags of redwood mulch every few months to keep her beds looking fresh and bright. This is such a waste of money, but also could be hazardous to the shrubs and trees the mulch encases.
The Harms of Over Mulching
Burying shrub or tree roots deeply under mulch decreases the oxygen supply. Roots need oxygen in order to provide it to plants.
Lack of oxygen prevents beneficial soil microbes from breaking down the mulch. Instead, harmful soil microbes produce substances that are toxic to roots.
Trees surrounded by mounds of mulch may send shallow roots into the mulch, instead of the soil. This makes them more susceptible to drought, stress, and wind.
Piling up mulch against the trunk provides a safe haven for harmful insects. It can also promote rot due to excess moisture retained by the mulch.
Mulching Rule of Thumb
Before topping off your beds with more mulch, first measure how much mulch is already there. A two to four-inch layer is ideal, and provides many benefits to plants like:
Weed suppression
Moisture retention
Slow addition of organic matter to the soil as the mulch decomposes.
Keeps mowers and weed trimmers away from trunks which can be easily damaged by such equipment.
Since mulch does so many good things, it is easy to think more would be better. In reality, thicker layers of mulch actually harm plants. When mulch builds up over four inches it often becomes a water repellent. When this happens water simply sheds off the top of the mulch rather than soaking in to the soil below, leaving plants thirsty.
Thick layers of mulch can also suffocate plant roots. We don’t often think about the role of air in the soil, but roots need air to survive. Burying root systems under excessive layers of mulch reduces the amount of air in the soil, causing plants to decline. This decline is usually slow, often taking years for plants to die from over mulching.
If you already have a four inch layer of mulch on your beds, but wish to add more to brighten up the bed’s appearance, you have two options.
Option 1: Remove part of the existing mulch before adding new mulch. You can add the old mulch to your compost pile or use it as an under layer for new beds.
Option 2: Stir up the existing mulch. Often only the top layer loses its bright appearance and if you mix the mulch up a bit, you will bring some of the more richly colored lower layers to the surface.
Another common mistake is to treat mulch like a soil amendment, mixing it into the soil when you plant. When mixed into the soil, they slowly release nutrients, help retain moisture and also improve drainage. Most mulches are too coarse to make good soil amendments. Often mulch and soil are mixed together by accident when new plants are set out. Over time, you can build up a layer of mixed soil and mulch that is several inches thick. Plants typically do not grow well in this mix because it stays too dry and because the decaying mulch actually pulls nitrogen out of the soil. To avoid mixing mulch with soil, always rake mulch away from the area before planting. If you have beds where mulch has become mixed with the soil, rake down to the soil level and be sure to plant into soil rather than mulch.
Need lawn care help or just chew the mulch with us, call today (214) 701-7622!
We love our dogs. What we do not love is the side effect of dog urine on our lawns. You know what we mean – those unsightly brown “burn” spots on the lawn. They make the yard unsightly and seem impossible to get rid of. And if like us, you have multiple dogs, you can quickly find yourself with a dead lawn.
How can dog urine turn your lawn brown?
Because dogs eat a high level of protein in their diet, they break the protein down and excrete it as nitrogen in their urine. The result unfortunately, can kill your lawn. You will get the same kind of burn if you put a concentrated handful of fertilizer in one spot. However, it’s interesting to note that not all dog’s urine does this, which is a mystery.
Is there anything you can do to protect your lawn from dog urine?
Here’s some advice on what pet owners can do to protect their lawn and keep their pet healthy and happy.
Use a leash to control where your dog urinates.
Water the lawn right after your dog urinates to dilute the nitrogen on the grass.
Dilute your dog’s urine by encouraging them to drink more water.
Try a different high quality dog food. Do not switch your dog’s food to a low quality, low protein food just to save your lawn. There are other ways that will not compromise your dog’s health.
Do not put fertilizer on your burned lawn to try and bring it back. Fertilizer’s are also high in nitrogen, so you will just speed up the killing.
There is no real way to remove the spots once they are there. In fact, as mentioned above, trying to use a fertilizer to get your grass to grow back will actually make it worse. It is best to just wait until the grass comes back on its own.
We make lawn mowing so easy. No hassle. $28 lawn mowing. All you have to do is pick up the phone and call us at (214) 701-7622. We take pride in the quality of our work, and always strive for complete customer satisfaction. After all, your lawn is our reputation!
First Response Lawn Care provides landscape maintenance to homes and businesses of all sizes. We do one thing, and we do it well – we make your lawn look the best it can. All work is performed by our friendly, professional staff. Here’s what we promise to deliver –
• Clean, Neat, Well Cut Lawn Free of Debris and Clippings
• Reliable, Same Day Service Every Week + Fast Response But Not a Rush Job
• Conscientious – Gates Closed and Environmentally Friendly
Our mowing service includes mowing, trimming, edging, and blowing off all hard surfaces. The stuff that isn’t fun to do yourself. It’s hot out there, and it’s hard work. Our goal is to simplify your life and/or business tasks so you can concentrate on the things that matter most to you.
For warm season grasses, like those you find in our great state of Texas, you should aerate in the early summer. Why? Because warm-season grasses begin their period of active growth in summer. If you aerate a warm-season lawn in late spring to early summer, the ensuing period of rapid growth will quickly fill in the holes you create. If you have Bahia grass, Bermuda, Buffalo grass, Centipede grass, St. Augustine or Zoysia grass, you have a warm season grass.
Aeration Tips
• Follow up the aeration treatment with fertilizing or reseeding your lawn since aeration creates openings for nutrients and seed to penetrate soil.
• The process of aerating can spread weed seeds or portions of weedy roots. Be sure to control weeds prior to aerating.
• If you have a newly planted lawn, wait for at least one year to aerate. This time lapse will ensure that the grass is well established.
• Aerate when soil is moist, but never when it’s saturated. The tines of a lawn aerator penetrate moist soil more deeply; soil that’s too wet clogs tines and isn’t as effective. To achieve the correct moisture balance, your lawn should absorb 1 inch of water – delivered through rainfall or irrigation – prior to aerating. This may mean you’ll water for one hour one day prior to aerating or, if your soil is hard, for shorter times on several days prior to aerating.
• Avoid aerating during drought or high heat. You’ll stress the lawn by allowing heat to dry soil If you aerate in these conditions,
• Plugs should be left on the lawn following aeration, as they contain soil microorganisms that help to break down thatch. These plugs disappear in a short period of time when left on the surface of the lawn.
Call First Response Lawn Care today if you have questions about aerating your lawn. Our technicians are trained to aerate at the optimum time for your soil conditions, giving you the best-looking lawn in the neighborhood.
We recently had a customer call with a great summer time question. For those families with children, you will appreciate this. This customer had a large (10 foot) inflatable pool taking up part of the lawn for a few days, and it killed their grass. When they discovered that there was some serious damage to the lawn underneath, they called First Response Lawn Care for solutions.
In a situation like this, we offer a few tips and advice on how to overcome the perils of inflatable pool fun versus the health of your lawn. The issue with inflatables is that they can cause damage to your lawn by blocking out air, sunlight, and water from reaching the grass beneath. We hope you’ll find the information helpful so you can continue with the summer fun with slip n slides, plastic pools, jump and bounce houses, etc.
If the lawn is damaged, we can certainly reseed and provide nutrients to encourage repair.
If the lawn is dead, we can quickly lay a patch of new turf in the area that is dead.
Move the summer play items on the lawn every 24 hours to a different spot if the items are smaller.
Empty the inflatables and hang them to dry each night. We realize this sounds like a pain, but not as painful and potentially expensive as replacing your lawn.
Whether you mow yourself or have scheduled lawn maintenance by a professional, it is important to move your inflatables off of your grass before mowing.
If you have a hard surface such as a patio, consider moving the inflatables there. One customer had a clever idea to put a big foam padding beneath so the pool bottom would stay cool and comfortable for the kids.
To get a free quote for a one-time or extended service package, call First Response Lawn Care Royse City, Rockwall today at (214) 701-7622 or contact us HERE Click the box below for more information about our services.
