A lot of standard lawn care was built for places where it rains in summer. Reno isn’t one of them. Heavy watering and the wrong fertilizer at the wrong rate can cost the land and water around you more than the lawn gives back.
Eco-friendly lawn care keeps the grass healthy with less water, fewer and better-chosen products, and quieter tools.
We feed lawns for a living, so we’ll be straight about it. The problem is rarely fertilizer itself. It’s the wrong product, at the wrong rate, put down by someone guessing about the soil.
Eco-friendly lawn care in Reno:
Fertilizer and pest products cause trouble when they don’t stay where you put them. Too much product, the wrong product, or a heavy watering right after it goes down sends the extra into the gutter, and from there to the river and the groundwater.
A spray put down where nothing needed it can also hit bees and butterflies. Gas mowers and blowers add to air pollution.
The practices below work the other way. Healthy soil holds more food for the grass, so the lawn needs less from a bag. Tough, low-water grasses cut the watering. Treating only the problem you have spares the insects and birds that were never the problem.
Some grasses want heavy watering and frequent mowing. Others get by on very little.
For a sunny lawn that gets walked on, tall fescue or a tall fescue and bluegrass blend is the usual pick here. It handles drought and foot traffic better than straight bluegrass. Fine fescue is the choice for shady, low-traffic corners.
Skip buffalograss and Bermudagrass, even though you’ll see them recommended for dry climates. Both are warm-season grasses, and warm-season grasses go dormant once it cools off.
In Reno that means a lawn the color of a paper bag from November to April. In fescue and bluegrass lawns, Bermuda is usually treated as a weed.
In a dry climate, watering is the big one. Too much wastes water and leaves the roots shallow and weak.
Yard watering pushes the average Reno home’s water use to about four times its winter indoor use. That’s where the savings are.
Water early in the morning, ideally before sunrise, so less evaporates before it reaches the roots. Watering at noon in July mostly waters the air. Deep, less frequent watering pushes roots down, and deeper roots ride out a dry spell better.
TMWA’s assigned-day watering gives each home three sprinkler days a week. No sprinklers from noon to 6 p.m., and every system rests on Mondays. The days in between give the soil time to soak it in, which cuts runoff.
The equipment helps too. A weather-based controller uses local weather or soil moisture to change the schedule for you. A rain sensor shuts off a cycle when it rains. In beds, drip lines put water right at the roots and waste less than spray heads.
Quick-release nitrogen works fast, and that’s the catch. Too much at once makes grass grow fast and weak, and weak grass gets sick more easily. Put down too heavy, it can burn the lawn outright.
The extra also washes off the lawn. Fertilizer that ends up in the gutter feeds the storm drain, not your grass.
Match the fertilizer to where you live. A lot of store fertilizer is sold the same way all over the country. It isn’t made for high desert weather, alkaline soil, or watering limits.
We build our fertilization program for local lawns, so the grass gets what it needs without the excess.
Buying a bag yourself? Look for slow-release nitrogen. It feeds the lawn a little at a time instead of all at once, so less of it washes down into groundwater.
A few organic sources help too:
They work alongside a feeding schedule rather than replacing it.
Compacted soil is common in Northern Nevada, and it keeps water and nutrients from reaching the roots. Core aeration pulls small plugs of soil to loosen it, so air, water, and fertilizer can get down there. Our page on lawn aeration explains how we do it.
A soil test shows which nutrients are low before you add anything. Then you fertilize only for what’s missing.
Aeration is also a good time to overseed. A thick lawn is the best defense against weeds there is, because it leaves them less room.
Weed killers and bug sprays work best aimed at the problem you actually have, not sprayed everywhere just in case. Pulling weeds by hand is as targeted as it gets, and it works well on annual weeds.
For weeds in the lawn itself, we use selective herbicides. They’re made to kill the weeds and leave the grass alone.
In Reno lawns, brown patches that look like drought can be billbugs, white grubs, or sod webworms. Pull back the turf at the edge of a patch and look before anything gets sprayed. Integrated pest management (IPM) aims to keep pests down to a level you can live with with as little harm as possible to everything else.
Pre-emergent stops weed seeds before they sprout, which means less spraying later. Our guide on when to apply pre-emergent covers the common crabgrass preventers and the local windows.
Whatever product goes down, follow the safety directions on the label. Keep pets off treated areas until they’re dry.
How you mow affects both emissions and the lawn. Battery equipment is cleaner and quieter than gas. On our newer bike routes, where crews ride between nearby yards, we run EGO.
Mow high, at 3 inches or taller. Taller grass grows deeper roots and shades out weeds.
Leave the clippings on the lawn. They work as a natural mulch that holds moisture and returns nutrients to the soil, and you get to skip the bagging.
Keep the mower blade sharp. A dull blade tears the grass instead of cutting it, and torn grass picks up disease more easily.
Cory’s Lawn Service runs a 5-step fertilization program and a separate 5-step weed control program, both applied by licensed spray technicians. It’s the less-but-smarter way to care for a lawn, with a turf agronomist on staff for problem lawns. Start with our lawn fertilization in Reno program.
