Every summer somebody sends us a photograph of a lawn with pale bands across it and asks what disease it is. Nine times out of ten it is not a disease.
Bands and strips follow a pattern, and patterns come from machines and from water. Disease arrives in blotches and rings. If the pale areas line up with the way the mower travels, or with the arc a sprinkler head throws, you are looking at a mechanical problem, and mechanical problems are cheap to fix.
The three usual causes
- The deck is too low. A short blade cannot shade its own root zone. In June and July we raise the cut and leave it raised. Grass cut tall looks slightly shaggier in week one and stays green through August.
- A blunt blade. A dull mower tears rather than cuts. The torn tips dry out and silver over, and the strips you see are simply where the mower passed most recently.
- Sprinkler coverage. Heads do not throw perfect circles. Where two arcs fail to overlap you get a dry wedge, and by mid July that wedge is a visible stripe.
How to tell them apart in five minutes
Walk the pattern. If it runs dead straight and changes direction where you turn the mower, it is the mow. If it curves, it is water. If it ignores both and sits in an irregular patch near a downspout or a low corner, it is drainage or fungus and worth a proper look.
The single cheapest thing most people can do for a Gulf South lawn in June is raise the mowing height by half an inch and leave it there until September.
What we change on a maintenance route
From late May our crews raise decks, cut in alternating directions week to week so the grass is never bent the same way twice, and stop bagging clippings unless the growth is heavy. Clippings put moisture and nitrogen straight back into the surface.
On irrigation properties we walk the zones in May, before the first dry week, rather than in July when the damage is already done. If your system has never been walked, that is usually the first hour of work worth paying for.