The summer lawn season of 2018 has literally left many tracks across the lawns in Northern Lake County.    As we had numerous rain days and service delays in June, July started off with a bang.  We then witnessed and are still investigating a heat tracking event that occurred July 13.   Beautiful Lake Villa lawn watered in summer   The difference between watering regularly adn not watering- notice the heat stress on right Warmer temperatures hit around the holiday week and have continued along with minimal rain for the rest of the month.  This has left a lot of lawns turning brown form heat and moisture (lack of) stress.  Once again this year the heat tracking phenomenon has hit the area hard.  On Friday July 13 many instances of heat tracking occurred across the area.  As I have posted heat tracking in previous year’s blogs, this year the damage was even worse.  Since the event took place on Friday July 13, most of the...

We have recently noticed a few instances of a somewhat rare phenomenon in the lawn care industry that we would like to point out in an effort to better communicate to both our customers and those interested in lawn care.  Along with the previously posted summer stress issues for the lawn in this blog, we wanted to bring up a more recent issue which is very rare but is currently a potential for lawns across the Antioch, Lake Villa, Lindenhurst, Gurnee, Lake Forest and Waukegan area.  This recent phenomenon is referred to by some in the industry as heat tracking. Heat tracking occurs when pressure is applied to the lawn from foot traffic, lawn mowers, fertilizer spreaders or anything else that can compress the leaf tissue down to the ground below.  When  this pressure is applied at the exact time frame (usually early afternoon at the peak heat of the day) that the turf is at its wilting point or entering dormancy stage it breaks the leaf tissue at the base o...