Save Money with Soil Testing to Improve Your Lawn By: Stephanie DiNicola, Education/Information Coordinator, Culpeper Soil & Water Conservation District Caring for the environment also means caring for your lawn. By using proper mowing and maintenance practices, you can enjoy a healthy, beautiful lawn while protecting local streams, rivers and lakes.
Our homes contain impervious surfaces (rooftop, patio, and driveway) that can’t absorb and filter rainfall. The underlying soil characteristics of the lawn can affect how the lawn absorbs and filters the impervious runoff. Soil compaction, low pH (e.g. acid soils), and low nutrients can all impact how vegetations grows in a lawn. Improperly applied or excess fertilizer, as well as other chemicals, are not retained in the landscape. They wash with rain and can contribute to harmful algal blooms and other water quality problems.
What is lawn care? It’s not just seeding, watering and mowing. We must amend the soil not only to feed the grass but to improve soil structure. Managing clippings and leaves are all part of lawn care too. Returning these byproducts improves the soil and vegetation. How we care for our lawn determines the degree of the environmental benefits and impacts we achieve. Healthy lawns can help prevent erosion, reduce runoff, and filter rainwater. A healthy lawn has uniform and mature vegetation that inhibits erosion and retains nutrients. A healthy lawn can capture over an inch of rain, traps dust and dirt, converts carbon dioxide to oxygen, and reduces the heat island effect with air temperatures up to 30 degrees cooler than pavement. A sparse lawn with bare soil needs improvement either by amending the soil or selecting different landscape plants. The soil should be tested every three years. A composite soil sample of the whole yard is collected. A soil test includes information on the amount of nutrients, organic matter and pH level. The proper balance is essential to a healthy lawn. Additional assessments of patchy bare spots could be done to verify foot traffic, recent disturbance, disease, or standing water.
The Culpeper Soil and Water Conservation District is working with local Extension agents to make sure homeowners have the knowledge and resources to do their part. The District is offering a voucher to cover the full cost of the soil test. For these vouchers, please contact Stephanie at (540) 825-8591 or stephanieD@culpeperswcd.org. For more information on lawn care, see the Virginia Extension Publication list.
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OCI May 2025
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