Brown Patch and Dollar Spot can be easily confused for one another—they prefer similar conditions and even manifest in similar ways. The main way you can tell them apart is simple, though: Brown Patch will leave large, circular areas of discolored grass on your lawn as opposed to the small patches found with a Dollar Spot infection.
In most cases, preventing lawn fungus is a simple matter of proper maintenance. Limiting moisture, ensuring access to adequate water and nutrients, mowing to a correct height, and choosing the right fertilizer will almost always yield a fungus-free lawn. If this sounds like a lot of work—well, it is. Don’t worry, though, because we have just the solution! A quality lawn care program like we offer at Blades of Green includes everything you need to prevent fungus.
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Having a lawn care problem that you can’t seem to solve? Send your question to our expert technicians and get the answers you need to get a healthy, beautiful lawn.
End the guesswork and stress of lawn maintenance. Let our experienced team put their expertise to work making your lawn healthy and beautiful. Types of Lawn Fungus While many different types of fungi can affect your lawn, there are five common ones that affect the common grass types of Maryland and Northern Virginia.
Lawn fungus will almost always manifest in areas of discolored, thin, or dying grass, making it easy to spot. A trained lawn care professional should be able to easily identify the particular variety on your lawn based on the pattern and distribution of these areas. Discolored areas are usually brown, white, yellow, or straw-colored and can often be sunken in appearance as well.
Unfortunately, lawn fungus will never go away on its own. Left to its own devices, lawn fungus will continue to spread and get worse until it takes over your lawn altogether. No matter how small an affected area is, it will always get bigger.
Since we know lawn fungus won’t go away on its own, this means that proper intervention from a trained lawn care technician is necessary to combat fungal infection and should be done as quickly as possible.
Organic solutions can be highly effective if applied early and to all affected areas. A few of our favorite natural remedies include neem oil, weak baking soda solutions, and composted tea leaves. None of these solutions are as effective against the advanced fungal spread as professionally applied fungicides but can still be a useful tool in your lawn maintenance routine.
Grasses are remarkably resilient plants and, in most cases, will fully recover from a fungal infection. It’s important to remember though, that there is no way to completely eliminate fungus from a lawn once it’s taken hold. Though they can be rendered dormant, fungal spores will persist. This, however, is not uncommon. Most lawns host multiple varieties of inactive fungus and are perfectly fine. The key is depriving it of the conditions that it needs to grow, which can be accomplished in many ways.