It is summer in Texas! And with the summer heat comes the need to monitor watering of plants closely so that you do not over or under water and to control those pesky weeds growing in the turf.
When watering your lawn and especially a new lawn, you want to make sure you are watering to a depth of 6 to 8 inches to encourage deep roots. To be efficient with your watering, you may want to set up multiple run times on each irrigation zone to avoid water running off your property and down the street. Turn your irrigation system on each zone, run and check when runoff starts. For spray zones, that is usually 5 to 10 minutes. On those spray zones, it might take 2 to 3 run times to wet the soil to a depth of 6 inches. You can check soil moisture depth with a screwdriver.
The drip zones in the curb median and in the beds can be run as per the irrigation guidelines for Pomona:
If weeds are a problem in your lawn, you have to attack back in two ways. One, you can control them as they start to germinate by using a pre-emergent herbicide. Pre-emergent needs to be applied in mid February for spring weeds, mid May for summer weeds. If you missed these applications, or if you did not get total control, you can use a post-emergent weed killer.
The product to be selected needs to target the weeds to be controlled. Weed control can be broken down into these categories – grassy weeds such as crabgrass, dalisgrass and poa annua; broadleaf weeds such as dandelions, clover and dollarweed and nutgrass.
Grassy weeds can be controlled with any of the many brands of Weed Control for Southern Grasses, control Poa Annua with Bayer Revolver, control nutgrass with Image and broadleaf weeds with Bayer Advanced Southern Weed Killer for Lawns. These are just examples of products you can purchase. Just make sure any product is targeted for your specific weed problem and follow all label instructions when applying. Some of these products will control many kinds of weeds and reading the label will give you this information.