Everyone desires for a lawn that is beautiful, green, thick, and healthy.
To achieve this, you have to work hard at developing and maintaining the lawn at all times.
But sometimes you put in the work and you still get yellow stripes.
Yellow stripes are caused by a lot of different reasons.
To begin with:
- overfertilization
- too much water
- underwatering
- lawn diseases
- pet urine
- nutritional deficiency
- and damage by a mower
With that in mind, yellow stripes could result from one or a combination of these things.
What Can You Expect? After reading this article, you will have a sense of why your lawn is discolored, and potential steps to take to remedy it.
Why Your Lawn Has Yellow Stripes
As we noted before, there are different reasons why you may have yellow strips across your lawn.
Most people think when your lawn turns yellow, it’s simply due to lack of sufficient water.
However, that’s not the only reason. Below we delve into the reasons that can produce yellow grass.
Overfertilization
Typically, fertilizing your yard is a good practice, which will result in green, lush, and healthy grass.
However, too much fertilizer will harm the health of your grass.
In fertilizers, nitrogen is the first number. Therefore, if you are applying a lot of fertilizers, you are applying a lot of nitrogen salts to your lawn.
This alters the pH of the grass and changes it to acid. The acid then burns the grass and causes it to yellow. This is referred to as leaf scorch.
Synthetic fertilizers are the type that is most likely to cause leaf scorch.
Fertilizer Misses
At times, when applying fertilizer, it is possible to miss areas.
Details are deficient in the nutrients that are given by the fertilizer.
The deficiency causes that part to turn yellow and the rest of the grass to flourish.
So, if you see an area of the lawn turning yellow soon after adding a fertilizer, those are the areas you missed.
Overwatering and Underwatering
When you overwater the lawn, it becomes saturated with water.
A saturated lawn can cause the grass roots to have shallow roots, which means they cannot access the nutrient, water, and food supply in the soil.
This leads to underdeveloped grass that will show up as yellow streaks.
Also, if you have an underwatered lawn, you can contribute to the grass discoloration. Especially during the summer when water can be scarce, your usage increases.
People try to mitigate the expense of watering, which resulted in less watering being applied.
A lawn that is deprived of water cannot perform the necessary functions to stay healthy and turn to a yellow color.
Lack Of Enough Nutrients
Your lawn could develop yellow strips for a number of reasons, one of them is not getting enough nutrients.
This could happen, for example, if the soil is not developing or if the lawn has gotten too wet with water, or it is just not getting enough fertilizer.
In particular, the nutrients that grass needs are nitrogen and iron. When grass is not getting enough nitrogen or iron, it becomes yellow in color.
Lawn Diseases
Just like any other plant, grasses are susceptible to disease.
For the most part, diseases stem from pests and/or insects. Disease in most lawns is fungal in nature and occurs when the grass is persistently damp.
Some example of diseases that can affect your lawn are:
- Fusarium
- Snow Mold
- Fairy Rings
- and Smut
By frequently overwatering your lawn, you diminish it’s resistance to diseases and create favorable conditions for fungal infections.
Diseases expressed themselves as yellow patches on the grass and cause the grass to atrophie.
Damage By a Mower
Mowing the lawn improperly could lead to extensive damage on your lawn and home landscape starting with the grass or lawn.
If your lawn has yellow lines an hour or two after mowing your lawn, it’s probably time to reconsider your mowing strategy.
Mowers can damage your grass for a variety of reasons.
First, you probably have dull blades on your mower.
Dull blades create a lot of stress on the grass and cause yellowing of the grass. Heavy mowers also contribute to the damage by placing additional stress on grass that is already under a lot of stress.
Secondly, cutting off too much grass and making your grass too short means that your grass is not able to capture enough moisture which also leads to yellowing of your grass.
If the ends of your blades of grass are yellow, but the blades of grass stalks are green and healthy then, the source of the yellowing is the mower.
Dog Urine
Dogs will pee just about anywhere.
Sometimes they select a particular spot in your yard, where they do their business. Dog urine has high nitrogen content.
Nitrogen can burn grass, resulting in yellow patches.
How Do I Get Rid of Yellow Stripes on My Lawn?
The first step to fixing lawn discoloration is knowing the cause.
Then, you can act on your lawn based on the cause.
For example, if the cause of the discoloration is underwatering, you can assess how much long you need to water your lawn to fix this issue.
However, there is way to get a lawn back to health, and here are some of the ways to make your lawn green and lush again.
Conduct a Soil Test
By doing a soil test, you’ll know what nutrients are missing, or lacking, in the soil.
You don’t have to have a soil test done by a professional — there are at-home test kits available that are very easy to use.
All of that said, you will get accurate results and will be able to easily correct course and provide your lawn the nutrient it is lacking.
Treat the Diseases
Once you’ve determined that you have a sick lawn, remember you’ve committed to treating it.
Use the fungicides to treat the larvae in the soil as well as eliminate the fungi that are causing the diseases. In time, you will see the grass starting to turn green again.
Correct Application of Fertilizers
To prevent potential over fertilizing, be sure to follow the manufacturer’s directions on proper dosage and method of application.
If you happen to over apply, just water the spot to dilute the effects of too much nitrogen.
Organic fertilizers are safer than synthetic fertilizers because organic is slow-releasing so you are less likely to burn your grass.
Finally, make sure to apply the fertilizer accurately so you do not miss a part.
Watering the Lawn Correctly
The goal is to make sure that you do not overwater or underwater your lawn.
When watering your lawn one thing to take into consideration is the weather.
For example – Throughout the rainy season, you do not need to keep watering the lawn since the rain has kept the soil moist.
During the summer when we are experiencing a drought, you may want to be a little more vigilant about watering your lawn so that it does not dry up.
Even so, don’t water in direct sunlight because the water will just evaporate off the grass and the grass will still dry out. The optimal time to water your lawn should be in the morning and early evening.
Furthermore, if you are using a sprinkler to water your lawn, make sure your sprinkler reaches all areas of the lawn.
Otherwise, those areas may dry out and become discolored. Basically, you should water your lawn when the top 2 inches of the topsoil is dry.
Proper Use of A Lawn Mower
Using your lawn mower correctly will protect your grass from discoloration:
- To begin with, don’t mow too frequently. The grass needs time to recover after you mow it. Frequent mowing will stress the grass, weaken it and probably will not restore growth.
- Secondly, don’t mow too short. It is recommended to cut the grass so that it is above 3 inches. This size will promote health in the grass.
- Lastly, try to mow when the grass is dry; you do not want to mow immediately after watering.
- Finally, a sharp blade is needed to limit stress to the grass. If you notice the blade becoming dull, sharpen it or replace it immediately.
If you’re facing difficulties mowing and maintaining your lawn, you might want to find a lawn care professional who can assist.
- (USA) – Best Lawn Care Service Near Me (USA Edition)
- (UK) – Best Lawn Care Service Near Me (UK Edition)
They can use their skill and knowledge to help keep your lawn in the best condition possible.
Supervise Your Pets
If you have a dog, train your dog to pee elsewhere so that you do not ruin your lawn.
Once the dog pees on your lawn, apply a urine neutralizer immediately. Urine neutralizer will stop the nitrogen in the urine from burning the grass.
Final Words
There’s nothing like having a beautiful green and lush lawn.
But yellow stripes on your lawn can ruin the whole look.
So it’s important to know what causes the stripes and what you can do to fix them.
As noted in the article, this may be due to over-watering, under-watering, over-fertilizing, or using your lawn mower wrong.