How Often Should You Mow Your Lawn in NW Oregon?
A lawn, like most things, requires maintenance to stay healthy and looking its best. An attractive and healthy lawn can offer many benefits to the local environment and the value of your property. This leads many homeowners to wonder, how often their lawn really needs to be mowed. The answer to this question comes down to several factors.
Time of Year: Undoubtably the biggest factor for knowing how often to mow your lawn, is the time of year. Here in the Pacific North West, our growing season is typically April through November. During the growing season, provided your lawn has proper water and nutrition, mowing once per week is usually a good place to start. With that in mind, the next factor that will determine how often you should mow your lawn, is the growth rate of your grass.
Growth Rate: To optimize your lawn’s health, a good rule to follow when mowing is to never remove more than one-third of the height of your lawn at any one time. For example, if your lawn is 2inches in height, it is best to mow your lawn before it gets longer than 3 inches in height. So this could mean mowing your lawn as often as every 4 days. Common practices that will increase the growth rate of your lawn are fertilization and irrigation. Having a fast growth rate may mean more cuts per year but each time the grass is cut it stimulates lateral shoot growth, which will lead to greater grass density and fewer weeds.
Winter Mowing: During the months of December to March, as your lawn goes dormant, the need for regular mowing greatly decreases. There may be some benefit to mowing occasionally during the winter months if your grass continues to grow slowly. In addition, mulching debris that fall into your lawn may be beneficial.
Why I Should Mow Often: Mowing often allows your grass to grow dense and weed free. Whenever your grass is cut, it causes the grass to send new growth laterally. This will improve the density of the grass in your yard. This increase in density will stop weeds from starting in your lawn.
References:
For more helpful information on this topic and others, visit OSU’s extension service at https://extension.oregonstate.edu/pub/ec-1521.
