Caring For Your Lawn When You Own a Dog
A lot of unpleasant surprises for your lawn can come from your dog. Its urine and feces are not especially good for your lawn due to their chemical characteristics. Large quantities of dog urine and feces can cause the lawn to become burnt.
How Dog Waste Affects Your Lawn
The high amount of nitrogen in dog waste is very bad for the lawn. Dog urine causes the most damage as it is released at a high quantity at a time, unlike feces that can be slowly absorbed in the ground. Also, dog feces can be removed quickly because they are very visible, but urine is not so easy to clean.
Another cause for lawn damage is a dog’s habit of marking all surfaces with urine. Lawn experts call the brown spots that appear on the lawn where the dog has released its waste, the “female dog disease.” There are types of lawn grass that are more resistant than others to the action of nitrogen in the dog waste. For instance, it is preferable to use Festuca grass rather than Cynodon grass when the owner has a dog.
Dealing with the Problem
The best thing that a dog owner can do to protect his lawn from the catastrophic effects of dog waste is to teach his pet that the lawn is a playground, not a toilet. Another measure that can be taken is to build a small fence around the lawn to keep the dog off the lawn. Another solution is to change the dog’s diet to make the urine less concentrated with nitrogen, but this is not advisable, as veterinaries do not approve of it and the result is not always the desired one.
Treating a Damaged Lawn
When the lawn has been damaged by dog waste, it is advisable to take a little extra care for making the lawn return to its initial stage. There are intensive treatments for this, like using gypsum or lime on the burnt areas. This way, the burns fade in time and the lawn recovers. Other measures to take are supervising the dog when on the lawn and watering the urine spots right after they are made to dissolve the nitrogen. The affected areas can also be seeded again.
In order to solve the problem, it is recommendable to use, in the same time, a training plan for the dog and to undertake the appropriate measures for the affected lawn.
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