Owning or renting a home with a yard around it gives you natural space you can enjoy. Whether it’s just nice to look at out the window or a place your family and friends enjoy, it’s a great thing to have. Still, it also comes with certain responsibilities, which can range from basic maintenance to make the landscape the envy of your neighbors.
Mowing and cutting your grass is a basic element to all that, and it doesn’t matter if your grass is a warm- or cool-season variant. If you want deep-green grass, then you need fertile soil that has abundant moisture, trace amounts of some iron, and enough nitrogen.
On the other hand, you might have an issue if you finish working the yard and then find yourself wondering why does grass turns yellow after cutting or mowing? There are many possible reasons for this. Keep reading to learn what they are.
Reasons Why Grass Turn Yellow After Cutting Or Mowing
1. Improper Mowing
Lawn grasses grow up from lower-stem shafts known as sheaths. These are thick and coarse, and it’s from these that green leaf blades grow up. The actual sheaths are usually yellow or tan in color. If you mow properly, you’ll only take off some of the green leaf blades.
You should never cut off more than 1/3 of the total grass height when you mow. Otherwise, you might expose the sheath and alter the color of your terrain.
2. Waiting Too Long To Mow
If you wait too long to do your mowing, then your lawn might have quite a volume of grass clippings that start settling in your yard. These can be beneficial in small volumes since they decompose and offer nitrogen to plant roots.
Still, your thatch layer should never be more than a half an inch in thickness. Mowing too often or not often enough are both risks here.
3. Stress On The Plants
Sunscald and dry soil are potential sources of plant stress that can cause yellowing after mowing. Leaf-blades on grass are greenest at the top where light is photosynthesized more. Lower blade sections are more hidden from the shade above. If you have hot summers or an occasional drought, then you might need to raise your lawnmower height.
4. Yellow Fungus
If any part of your yard has a yellow fungus, then cutting it and spreading the cuttings all over the yard can spread the fungal infection out more. Rust fungus can develop yellow patches in your yard; fight this one with aeration and enhanced drainage.
Also look out for Rhizoctonia root rot, which is a real threat under 68 F in the fall/winter and winter/spring seasonal transitions. Fight this one with a good fungicide.
5. Dull Mower Blades
If your lawnmower crossing the yard leaves behind waves of shredded grass behind it, then check the blade. Ragged edges along the tops of grass means you need to sharpen the blades.
Otherwise, your grass is undergoing needless stress that hurts its health.
6. Scorching Weather
In the summertime, your grass loses its water quickly. Part of this is because it has to release moisture via evapotranspiration in order to stay cool and keep its internal processes going.
When grass is already under a lot of stress, cutting it can really hamper it, and yellow tips are the result. Compensate for this by raising your mowing deck and/or mowing not so frequently while you have withering temperatures.
7. Species Matters
Some forms of grass form in bunches and they grow from above-ground points. Bunching species, such as tall fescue, are therefore more easily hurt from low mowing. If you cut species like these shorter than 3 inches, you might actually damage their growing nodes.
8. Frequency Of Your Watering
Lawns that don’t get watered right are usually unhealthy, and that comes through when mowing adds even more acute stress. Watering too frequently means shallow root systems.
Alternatively, watering less frequently but in higher volumes improves root strength and plant vigor.
9. Issues Underneath The Sod
Low-caliber soil that doesn’t hold enough water or drains too fast might also make a lawn yellow after mowing. Sandy soil patches will drain faster than their surrounding soil, which means your grass is less able to put up with the stress that mowing puts on it. Buried debris might also limit how deep the soil will let roots grow, meaning you get small patches of yellow around the yard after mowing.
Solution:
Steps you can take for these issues include annual dethatching, improving soil water retention by incorporating compost or mulch into the upper layers of your soil or just watering problem areas with increased frequency in order to compensate for unusually rapid water loss.
10. Under Fertilization
If you have a lawn without enough nutrition, especially nitrogen and iron, then it can start looking yellow. Fertilization can amend soil lacking in nutrition, and doing soil testing can tell you which nutrient or nutrients are missing in particular.
That way, you can pick the right garden feed to address your issues at proper levels without doing overfertilization of any other nutrients, which is a problem all its own.
11. Over Fertilization
Surprisingly, excess fertilizer can be a bigger risk than under fertilization. It can actually scorch the grass and do more damage. While fertilizer has nitrogen necessary for healthy grass growth, an overabundance of it can actually burn the roots and even alter the soil pH. Using a soil test kit is a great way to make sure you’re not doing this.
In Conclusion
Whether you mow your yard yourself, have your kids do it, or just pay someone up the block, yellow grass is always something you’ll notice after it gets cut. Not only will you notice, but so too will your neighbors and passers-by.
If you notice your neighbors also having this issue, chat them up, as there might be a common culprit throughout your community. If you can find out what specifically is bothering everyone, you can address it much faster. If not, check your watering schedule, your soil, your mowing deck height, and the quality of your mower blades.