Lawn care and mowing in the New River Valley

Most lawns around here are tall fescue, and fescue keeps its own calendar. It comes on hard from April into June, when you can lose a week and end up baling instead of mowing. It slows down through the July and August heat. Then it wakes back up in September and runs into October.

A mowing schedule that ignores that either leaves you shaggy in May or has somebody cutting dust in August. Trevor sets the interval to the season instead of billing a fixed number of visits whether the grass needed it or not.

What a regular cut includes

• Mowing at a height the lawn can hold — fescue cut too short in summer browns out and lets crabgrass in
• String trimming around fences, posts, foundations, and anywhere the mower can't reach
• Edging along walks, curbs, and the driveway so the line stays sharp
• Clippings blown off hard surfaces, not left on the walk or washed into the storm drain

Seasonal cleanups

Two heavy weeks a year do most of the work on a yard. Spring cleanup clears out what winter dropped — sticks, matted leaves, dead growth in the beds — so the lawn gets light and air before it starts pushing. Fall cleanup is leaves, and around here that means oak and poplar leaves, which mat down heavy and will kill a patch of fescue by spring if they sit through the winter.

Lawns that got ahead of you

Sometimes the job isn't a schedule, it's a rescue. A rental that sat empty a season, a property after a family member moved out, a yard that got past knee-high while somebody was in the hospital. That's a brush job first and a mowing job second, and Trevor does both. No judgment attached to it — it happens to a lot of people, most of them once.

Overseeding and the fall window

If a lawn is thin, the time to fix it is late August into October, not spring. Fescue seeded in fall has two cool seasons to root before it faces a summer. Spring-seeded fescue gets a few weeks and then July. Ask about it when Trevor comes to look and he'll tell you whether the lawn is worth seeding or whether the real problem is shade, compaction, or drainage.

Lawn care runs through Christiansburg, Blacksburg, Roanoke, Floyd, and the towns in between. It's also the one service the big tree companies around here don't offer at all, which means when a tree comes down and tears up the yard, Trevor is the one who can put both back right.