 I'm Ron Smith, NDSU Extension Horticulturist and turf grass specialist. Today we're gonna be talking about early spring lawn care in North Dakota and Western Minnesota. The first thing I wanna caution you about is to not get started too early. And if you do, you're gonna end up by opening up the turf grass canopy to some air, some light, and the weed seeds that are there being hidden by that turf grass canopy are gonna begin to germinate and get a head start on your grass. Then you'll be fighting weeds all summer long. So once the grass is starting to show some green color, you can then go ahead and do some of this work. What we have here that we're gonna be demonstrating for you today are some basic lawn care pieces of equipment. Of course, over here to the right is a mower, a rotary mower that we are going to lower the height on. And what that'll do is it'll pick up the dead grass from last year and open up that canopy a little bit, but not too much to allow for the crown of the grass plant to warm up and begin some growing. Then the next thing we're gonna do to help improve the soil condition here is to take the aerator. This will pull out plugs of soil about two to three inches long and open up that soil canopy for better aeration, air movement, water movement and help to improve overall root growth of the turf grass. Then we're gonna follow up with that with a power rake. Now this is a machine that spins some impellers, sharpened pillars on an axle here at a very high speed and that spreads the soil evenly over the turf grass surface, acting as a top dressing, which benefits the grass plant itself. Then if you have any bare spots that you would need to do any seeding, overseeding on, you can go ahead and get your grass seed, a mixture of Kentucky blue perennial rye and fine fescue, sprinkle it on the bare spots, drag it in with the back of a broom rake, let the rain come or water it yourself and you've got yourself a renovated lawn. What we have here now is a mower that we used last year at the standard mowing height, which is about two and a half to three inches in height. That's a good height to maintain your lawn at all summer long. And then for this particular purpose, we're gonna drop the mowing height down to roughly about an inch. And so you can see the designation here that we have on this particular model of mower. It's a A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Way, way up there would be very high. That'd be about a four inch mowing height. So we're gonna drop it down to roughly B and see how it goes. That should bring us down to about an inch mowing height. If we drop it too low, we take the chance of having a scalping effect, which as if that happens, we are gonna be damaging the crown of the grass plant that's gonna slow it down as far as regrowth goes. And it gives those weed seeds that are ever present in our turf grass canopy a chance to go ahead and get a jump start on the grass. You should have changed your oil last fall before putting it away for the winter. If you didn't, you should do it now before you start doing any mowing this spring. And most cases, the mowers today have a little bit different starting procedure than they used to have. Remember the old choke that you had to push over to get it started? Not anymore. Now they have these little bulbs that you have to push down here. And they say push them in slowly all the way three to four times. All right. And most of them have a governor on them so you don't have to worry about any speed. And a lot of them have battery starts but we don't have a battery start. So I'm the battery here for this particular mower and give it a pull or two. As you may have noticed, we have a bag on this mower and it's a good idea when you do this type of mowing, scalp mowing at this time of year. It's a good idea to pick up those clippings because you don't wanna be adding any more organic matter leaf litter back onto the lawn that is necessary at this time. Through the rest of the year, you don't need to bag your clippings. Most mowers nowadays have a mulching blade so the clippings are cut into little confetti-sized pieces and they're blown right back into the turf canopy and actually are returning some of the nutrients to the lawn. So it cuts down on at least one fertilization a year. So this is the only time that you'd ever wanna go ahead and collect the clippings. What would be at this time of year or if you should happen to be away on vacation and the kid that you hired to go ahead and cut your lawn while you were away didn't do it. They come back and your grass is almost knee high then you'd wanna go ahead and collect them at that time. After we get done with our scalp mowing, we wanna go ahead and get into sharpening our blade after that because we've gotten it a little bit lower than we like to and it's gonna dull the blade and we don't wanna mow your lawn all summer long with a nice sharp blade. So it'll do a much better job and cut down on disease problems as well. What we have here is a spindle aerator, our drum aerator sometimes it's known as and this one will pull plugs easily from the turf. It's an easy one for the homeowner to go ahead and manage because it's on an axle and as we go forward these tines will spin around and pull out plugs of soil and that's very easily operated, something you can probably rent from a equipment rental place and a lot easier to handle for the homeowner to handle than the reciprocating ones which are a little bit bigger, beefier and should probably be handled only by our lawn care professionals. This is our soil here, this is thatch from here to here, that's about an inch of thatch a little bit more than we would like to have on a lawn and so the core aeration and the follow-up of the power raking will help to reduce this thatch down to about a half an inch. It's like body fat, a little bit is good, too much is not good. We don't wanna core aerate when it's too wet or we're gonna have a sloppy mess and actually destroy the structure of the soil or too dry because the pluggers will actually just walk across the top of the soil and not be very effective at all. Keep in mind that core aeration is a drying effect as well as an aerating effect. What'll happen with these holes now is that the root systems from the adjoining plants will go ahead and grow into those open holes and make a nice, good, healthy turf. It'll help to revitalize the turf for us. So now next what we're gonna do is we're gonna take and run the power rake over here and see how well it would break up. Generally speaking, when the soil is wet like this and it's a heavy clay soil, it'll be more effective if you can let this dry for a day and then come back either later in the afternoon or the next day, the next morning, with a power rake and break these up and they'll pulverize a lot easier than if they are wet like this, especially in heavy clay. What we're gonna do next is go over the cores that we pulled out here previously with this power rake and there are several different models of power rakes on the market. This particular one happens to have a single axle where the impellers spin around at a very, very high speed and pulverize the plugs. Also pull up some of the thatch that's down there as well and so it'll create a lot of work for you as that goes on. This moves along at a pretty good pace so if you're not up in good physical shape, you might wanna let somebody younger go ahead and do it but you're gonna have to be holding this back as you operate this thing and you're gonna be walking into your own duff, so to speak and it's a good idea to wear safety shoes with this. I have steel-toed boots on to protect myself. Certainly don't go out and do this in shorts and sandals. It's not a good idea to do that. Very, very poor consideration for your own safety but it does the job very quickly and then the cleanup afterwards takes a lot more time. After we're done with the power raking, we have a lot of grass litter, old grass litter, dead grass from the previous year and we don't wanna leave it laying on the grass on the surface of the lawn. So if we can get down there with a broom rake, leaf rake or you can try your mower with a bagger but that's a lot of work, simply get down there and pick this up, get it out of here with the rake and you'll see here that we have mostly nice green grass waiting there that's gonna take off very quickly for us and do a good job. Most of the plugs will be destroyed and what you see left here now are the little pieces of thatch that were on the top of the plugs right there. This is all essentially organic matter which will disintegrate, break down, we can pick it up easily with our leaf rake or in subsequent mowing so it's no big problem. The other little side benefit with a power rake is that it hits the uneven spots in your lawn and it has a tendency to level those out a little bit. So if you have trouble with worm castings, making your lawn very uncomfortable to walk across, you can go ahead and just use a power rake and that'll knock those castings down and even out your lawn a little bit. So you can see we've got some good grass here, ready to go ahead and get started and take off with the nice warm weather that we're getting and in no time at all we'll have a beautiful thick flush lawn.