Did you enjoy the warm weather we have had lately? Don't worry it won't last and we will be back to winter before long. But this warm weather does pose a problem for your yard. 

After the extreme cold we had prior to this warm-up, some trees and shrubs think it's spring already and are starting to swell their buds with water and nutrients. If these buds open they will surely freeze off which will weaken the plant, if not kill them outright. There is not a lot you can do to help them with this problem, it is just a result of the crazy weather.

With all the snow melting off around my house, I'm left with a lot of mud. My front lawn is so squishy you can't walk across it without getting wet feet. Lily and Peebles are soaked when we get done playing frisbee everyday and the scent of wet dog is always so appealing.

With as muddy as my lawn is right now, I know that I will need to overseed my lawn again come springtime. Unlike seeding a lawn for the first time, overseeding is easy, but timing is everything. You wouldn't want to reseed a lawn right now even with the warmer weather. Wait until April or May for the best results and use this tip, put your grass seed in the refrigerator for twenty-four hours before you use it. This will cut down the germination time by up to fifty percent.

So instead of taking fourteen to twenty-one days for good perennial seed to germinate, you can get it to come up in seven to ten days. 

Any grass seed that states that it is fast, quick or anything like that are most likely annual seed which does come up naturally in half the time, but the annual grass seed will not survive year to year. 

Perennial seed is the way to go unless you have money to throw away every spring. Most grass seed is sold as blends consisting of bluegrass, ryegrass, tall fescue and creeping fescue. The ryegrass is the one you need to look at, as there is perennial ryegrass and annual ryegrass. 

When buying grass seed, it is best to get a seed mix with no more than thirty percent annual ryegrass in it. Obviously, the lower the percentage of annual ryegrass the better.

You should also know your seeds. Bluegrass needs a lot of sun and will not do well in shadier areas. Creeping fescue forms a network of roots and runners, like strawberry plants, that make it well suited for sloped areas where erosion controls needed. Tall fescue and ryegrass are your all around seeds that will do well in lower light areas as well as in the middle of the front yard. 

Now unless you are an Agrostologist, someone who researches grass varieties, you are not going to be able to tell the difference between bluegrass and fescue once it starts to grow in your yard. This is why seeds are blended together, so that they can be more versatile and hardier for the consumer. If you were to put down bluegrass only and your yard went from all sun in the front yard but only fifty-fifty in the backyard, your front lawn would look great but your backyard would look like a dog with mange with patches of fur falling out, not a pretty site. 

Some of you may know that back in the day, I played Dungeons and Dragons. As part of the game each character has six prominant statistics, one being wisdom and another intelligence. Many people ask what is the difference? The difference is, intelligence tells us that corn is actually a grass and wisdom tells us that we don't want to plant it in the front yard. Enjoy the weather, it's the only weather we've got.