Author: Dianne DeLongchamps
Do I really need professional lawn care, or can I DIY it?
You can absolutely DIY the fundamentals. Mowing height, mowing frequency, blade sharpening and watering are all within reach and they’re the highest-impact things happening to your lawn. Where professional service earns its keep is calendar precision, diagnosis, aeration equipment, and consistency across a full season when life gets busy.
Clean Air Lawn Care is an organic treatment company in Fort Collins, Windsor and Timnath who focuses on fertilization, weed control, aeration, overseeding and pest monitoring. Mowing stays yours to decide. The advice Luke, Owner and expert in NOCO, gives every customer is free either way: never below 3 inches, 3.5 in July and August, and 1 to 2 inches of water per week across two to three deep waterings, 2 inches from mid-July to mid-August. Most of the lawns we work on are turf-type tall fescue and Kentucky bluegrass, and we post turf signs after every treatment, as Colorado requires.
Plenty of great lawns around here are entirely homeowner-maintained.
What lawn care can I do myself?
Mowing height. This is the biggest lever you own and it costs nothing. CSU publishes two ranges. PlantTalk 1515: “the preferred height of Colorado turfgrass species is two inches to three and one half inches.” Fact Sheet 7.202: “the preferred mowing height for all Colorado species is 2.5 to 3 inches.” Our own standard sits at the top of CSU’s band.
The one-third rule. CSU repeats this in three separate publications: “Mow the turf often enough so no more than 1/3 of the grass height is removed at any single mowing.” If your grass got away from you, take it down in two passes a few days apart.
Sharpening your blade. Almost nobody does this and it’s in CSU’s guidance: “Sharpen blades after every third mowing, or, at the least, once a month” (PlantTalk 1515). A dull blade tears grass instead of cutting it, and torn tips brown out.
Leaving your clippings. PlantTalk 1515: “Clippings break down quickly, which allows nitrogen and other nutrients to be recycled.” And CSU 7.202 settles the old argument: “Grass clippings do not contribute to thatch accumulation.” Bagging isn’t doing you any favors.
Watering. Most articles hand you a fixed schedule. CSU rejects that framing: “Grass species, grass health, soil conditions, and weather conditions should dictate irrigation practices, not the number of days between waterings.”
Think in volume and observation, not days. CSU’s general shape is that “irrigating once per week works in the spring and fall, and twice a week works in the summer,” while noting the volume depends on your soil. Clay needs “1 to 1 1/2 inches of water to moisten the root zone to a 6-inch depth,” where sand may need “as little as 1/2 inch.” Our own target sits inside that spread.
What does a professional lawn program actually add?
Hitting the actual dates. Here are the dates:
- Pre-emergent: CSU says apply “by mid-April in the northern Front Range.” Not “spring.” Mid-April.
- Aeration: “Late August to late September, as fewer weed seeds germinate this time of year.” CSU calls core cultivation “essential for all lawn areas, especially those that are thatchy or subject to high traffic.”
- Bluegrass billbug adults: active early to mid May. Rocky Mountain billbug: early to mid-June. (Worth knowing even though CSU calls billbugs “relatively uncommon in Colorado lawns.”)
- Fall nitrogen: “Late September to early November at lower altitudes.”
Miss the mid-April pre-emergent window by three weeks and you’re not applying a pre-emergent anymore. You’re applying nothing. That quietly costs a season.
Diagnosis. The hard call in Colorado isn’t billbugs versus chinch bugs — CSU describes both as uncommon here. It’s telling grub damage from necrotic ring spot, which CSU identifies as “the most common lawn problem in Colorado” and which is a root and crown rot, not an insect. Both produce dead patches. The treatments have nothing in common. Guess wrong and you lose weeks. See [Grub Damage vs. Fungus Damage: How to Tell the Difference]
Grubs are the pest that deserves your attention. CSU: “White grubs are the most damaging insects that occur in Colorado.” And before you treat anything, CSU’s thresholds: nine or more per square foot on drought-stressed turf, or five or fewer for the larger May and June beetle grubs.
Equipment. Core aerators, calibrated spreaders and solar-powered electric equipment aren’t things most people buy for occasional use. Renting an aerator for a weekend is a real option, it’s just often close in cost to having it done.
Consistency. Organic programs are cumulative, and the most common reason a DIY organic program underperforms isn’t knowledge. It’s June getting busy.
Can I do part of it myself and hire out the rest?
That’s where most of our customers land. They mow and water themselves and hand off the calendar-dependent work like fertilization, weed control, aeration, overseeding, and pest monitoring.
If you do hire out the mowing, the two things worth insisting on are a 3-inch minimum height and vertical edging. Full list of what we handle is at our services page.
When is DIY the right choice?
If you enjoy the work, have a straightforward established lawn, and are willing to track Colorado-specific dates, DIY works fine. CSU Extension and PlantTalk Colorado are excellent, free, and written for our soil rather than someone else’s. We point people there all the time, customers or not.
We’ve handed out CSU links to people who never became customers and never will, and that’s completely fine by us. If you’d rather stop tracking April dates and August aeration windows and just have it handled, that’s what Luke’s out there doing most days of the week. Either way, we hope your yard has a good season.
Clean Air Lawn Care Northern Colorado is owned by Dianne, Paul, and Luke DeLongchamps — a family business serving Fort Collins, Windsor, and Timnath with organic lawn treatments and solar-powered electric equipment.
