Keep Your Family Closer for Christmas with Winter Lawn Care

This winter, aside from seeding your lawn with winter rye (which you’ve already done) there won’t be too much for you to do in your yard. If you’ve been looking for a good way to ease your kids into a little responsibility, this is the perfect time of year and your yard is the perfect place to get started.

We aren’t recommending you send the kids out back with a Weed Wacker and hatchet, but there are some reasonable steps you can take towards teaching your kids to take pride in creating a beautiful lawn.

This Christmas, consider adding a few seed packages to their stocking. Planting and growing their own flowers will show your kids how much fun gardening can be, and give them a quick win to build their confidence. Snapdragons, petunias, pansies, marigolds and geraniums all grow really well in the winter with a little water and direct sunlight. Get your kids a watering can that is small enough for them to wield and durable enough for them to drop without damaging it and a hand shovel, they will be ready to go.

Small flower gardens are the perfect place to teach kids the basics of gardening on a small scale:

• Too much water is bad for seeds, they need it but only a little bit or they won’t grow.
• The sunlight helps plants grow strong, they can’t grow in the dark.
• Weeds steal the dirt, water and sunlight from flowers and plants and try to kill them.
• If we let leaves from the trees fall on our flowers, we won’t be able to see them and they won’t grow as pretty in a messy place.

These lessons are transferable to the rest of the yard and nothing teaches a childlike emulating their parents. Buying your kids their own yard tool set is a great way to help them burn off energy, spend time with you, learn a necessary skill and take some pride in their work. You can probably find thick plastic replica tools that will be useless in the yard but safe for your kids to swing around and leave out in the all-weather, but we don’t recommend those. If you’re trying to teach your kids the right way to garden, they will need the right tool set for the job. Child size wood and shafted metal headed rakes, hoes and shovels are inexpensive and will hold up to actual use. You will have to teach them to use them safely and you’ll have to lock them up with your tools, but this isn’t the kind of thing you want them doing without you anyway.

Make it fun for your kids to rake up under the mesquite tree, race them while you’re raking up under the pecan tree. You can teach them that:

• Leaves that cover the grass don’t let any sunlight through and can kill it if we’re not careful.
• Leaves can be mulched, or cut up, and spread across the lawn to help the grass grow healthier.
• A green soft lawn is prettier and nicer than a crunchy brown lawn.

Growing the plants you want and preventing the ones you don’t can be a lot of fun for the whole family. Make it easier on yourself by having your yard sprayed with our pre-emergent weed killer, because pulling weeds is not the part of winter lawn care you want to introduce your kids to at this stage.

Enjoy your Christmas, enjoy your lawn and if you need help keeping it green, we can help. Our passion is more than just growing – It’s keeping your landscape investment healthy for years to come.

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