Leaves Frozen to the Ground

The quick freeze caught many trees by surprise with their leaves still on. The other issue are leaves frozen to the ground. So how do we get these leaves cleaned up? The EZ way is to wait until spring to deal with the mess. However you may get a break in the weather with a warm up allowing you to get to those leaves, but now they are compacted on the ground. Here is a good trick, you can get an adapter for your mower for lawn thatching that goes on your lawn mower. This is either a blade with a spring wire or wires that go on the front of your mower like this.

The front mount will tear at the leaves and eventually get jammed with leaves but just keep going, it still will disrupt the leaves frozen to the ground enough to be able to pick them up. The blade version is best and it will also dethatch your lawn. This will mean you bag will fill up very fast, so to make it EZ, get a dozen small cheap tarps and put them out on the lawn, dump your bag on these tarps as you go, then take the tarps to the dumping area or throw them in a pickup all at once to speed things up. video demo at www.diylawntime.blogspot.com

What did this quick freeze do to your yard?

This quick freeze will only hurt your plants and turf if they have not hardned off. If your area had warm weather like the NW did this last month, the plants were still transpiring and a quick freeze did do some frost burn. This will include the elongation of the stems, evergreen foil edges. There isn't anything you can do at this time to correct the problem other than wait until spring and restore the health of the plant. Turf blades that are frozen can break when they are driven over by heavy weighted vehicles. If the snow came down and blanketed the grass before the deep freeze you will find the grass has spring and bendable under the snow. But if the grass was frozen quickly it will be stiff and break off. If your tree pruning service comes in and drives on that grass it will break and be brown in the spring. Grass is resilient and will recover within a month or two after the spring thaw as the new blade grows. But if you do not want that look in the spring, keep the heavy trucks off of it. Often the tree company will put plywood down and tell you this will prevent that, it will help by distributing the weight but it still depends on how frozen the grass blade was.