All over the city and the surrounding parishes the sight is a common one: Normally green lawns with patches – sometimes small, sometimes much larger, of brown, apparently dead or dying grass.
It’s unsightly and yet another result of the extreme heat the area has experienced this year with double digit days of triple digit temperatures and very little rain.
“It puts a lot of stress on the lawn,” said Mike Casey of Vista Landscaping in New Orleans. “It kind of causes it to work overtime to try to reach for whatever it can in the ground as far as water. The lack of rain is the killer.”
Casey recommends using a sprinkler for your lawn and he recommends using it early in the morning for a “good period of time.”
He said that normally brown patches in lawns can come from a disease or fungus or from an insect taking up residence, but this year looks like an old-fashioned drought coupled with the extreme heat.
Casey also recommends not cutting your grass so low. He said that puts “extra stress” on the lawn.
But lawns aren’t the only vegetation suffering in the heat. Trees are also under stress.
“We see widespread signs of stress,” said horticulturist Dan Gill. “Trees are shedding. Trees are changing color. They have scorched edges. In the most extreme circumstances, we see entire trees – large, well-established trees, are turning brown.”
Gill said just because your tree looks bad doesn’t mean it’s finished. Gill says they may have just shut down their foliage. “They may possibly recover.”
Gill says that if they don’t “leaf out” by next May, they are dead and would need to be removed, but most have strong and deep roots that can survive, even in these extreme conditions.