To have a nice lawn, you have to mow it periodically. If you use a walk behind mower, there are some things you need to do each season to take care of it. Otherwise, you can damage your lawn when you mow.

Each spring when it is time to start mowing, replace the sparkplug and blade on the mower. You can often get kits with everything you need for the yearly maintenance in them. Hopefully, you drained the oil and gasoline out of the tanks before putting your mower up for the season. If not, you need to do that now. Stale gasoline and oil can damage the motor and make it really hard to get it started.

"How should I fertilize my lawn this spring?" a friend of mine asked me a couple weeks ago. My reputation for green lawns is legendary in my circle of influence. "The grass never really perked up last spring, and I want to get off on the right foot."

"If your grass lost its oomph in the summer, you might have a cool season grass," I replied. "Or maybe you didn't water it enough."

"I watered it just fine! The sprinklers even have a timer!"

"Sorry, sorry," I said, raising my hands in a calming gesture. "If you have a cool season grass, it'll be coming into the end of its growth cycle during spring. You only need to water it if it starts to look a little worn down."

Winter's rough, no doubt about it. Cold, snowy, blech. Animals hibernate, people disappear inside their heated houses, and once-green lawns become submerged underneath a thick layer of snow.

Just because all that life hides away out of sight doesn't mean it's gone, obviously. Baby deer and baseball games return in full force every spring.

But grass... well, your grass isn't always so lucky.

Lawns suffer in the winter when people forget there's green stuff underneath all that white stuff. All kinds of common winter activities can harm your yard and leave dead patches of soil where grass once grew. Plows dig up the lawn close to the road and snow blowers and shovels tear into the ground near driveways and walking paths. Playing children jump in the snow, compacting hidden soil and killing hidden grass. If your dog pees in one specific spot all winter lawn, the nitrogen-heavy urine builds up in the ground and burns away the lawn in that spot.

Spring cleaning.

The two words seem innocent enough by themselves. Spring. Cleaning. No biggie, right? But like Voltron, the words combine to form something greater than the individual parts, transforming into a phrase guaranteed to induce groans and sighs from homeowners nationwide.

Spring cleaning. Sigh.

While most of us think of dusting, vacuuming and beating draperies with tennis rackets when someone uses the two dreaded words, your home's interior isn't the only area that needs a little TLC after a long, cold winter. Yep, you need to focus some of that picking-up power on your lawn, too.

Life needs nutrients to grow and thrive. Babies drink their mother's milk, healthy adults eat a balanced diet, and lions consume the meat of spry gazelles. Your lawn's no different – grass is a form of life that needs the same nutrients as anything else.

Okay, maybe not the exact same nutrients – you won't see turfgrass rearing up to eat small savannah animals anytime soon. Lawns draw their sustenance from the soil they're planted in, in the form of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and a host of other nutrients.

Over time, however, hungry lawns and plants suck the available nutrients out of the ground, leaving behind empty soil. Lawns rooted in empty soil become malnourished and grow limp and brown.

Like a car, you get hours and hours of use and enjoyment out of a well-tended lawn. You keep it running strong with occasional lubrication and refueling in the form of water and fertilizer. However, just like a car, a lawn suffers from the pitfalls of extended use, running at less than optimal capacity after you rack up enough hours on it. The grass grows a little less green and rainfall drains a little slower.

Yep – your lawn needs a tune-up. Some quick aerating and a thorough dethatching will have it growing like new again.

(A quick aside: fall's the normal time for aeration and dethatching, but if your lawn looks patchy and tightly packed after a harsh winter, performing the process in the spring restores the look of the yard for the rest of the year.)

It is important to understand what you are putting on your lawn and what it does. We all want a beautiful lawn that is weed free. We need to be careful, however, when using herbicides.

Many lawn weeds are broad leaf weeds. The herbicide 2,4,D, sold under many brand names, will do a good job of killing them. It is the active ingredient in most weed and feed type products as well as most turf builder products.

There is a catch, however, to this happy picture. Saint Augustine grass is a broad leaf plant. If you put 2,4,D on it, you will kill it deader than a door nail. It happens every year. Someone spreads weed and feed on their lawn, then calls a week or two later complaining that the lawn is yellow. Dead as a doornail, have to re-sod. Don’t let this be you.

Your lawn looked great heading out of fall – lush, green, and spot-free. Then the snow came, thick and white and cold, and when the piles melted in the spring, to your shock you found your once-immaculate lawn was spotted with decaying yellowish circles.

Snow mold. Blech.

Snow mold occurs most frequently when the first snow of the year falls wet and heavy and the ground underneath doesn't have a chance to freeze properly. The excessive and relentless snow hammering much of America in the winter of 2011 could make snow mold a major problem in the spring.

Fortunately, while the appearance of snow mold can be disheartening, the blight is relatively easy to eradicate. The bad news is you'll have to watch your lawn get worse before you can help it get better.

Treating sod like any other purchase is a big mistake. Choosing sod for your yard takes much more preparation and care than buying carpet for your living room – at least if you want the installation to be successful.

For most of the things we buy, quality can be broken down into a number of statistics, properties we can measure: the thread count of a sheet, or whether a rug is fire proof or fire resistant. Sod can be inspected in a number of ways too: the thickness of the soil and the price per square foot are two common measurables. However, unlike carpets and sheets, sod is a living, breathing entity, panels or strips of mature lawn, and the condition of the sod coming in has a huge effect on the final look of a lawn.

Ahhhh.... Springtime. The sun shining outside signifies the end of a long, dreary, closed-in winter. Chirping birds greet you as you open your front door and frolick into your finally-thawed yard... where you freeze and stare in horror at the patches of brown, dead grass slashed across your lawn.

Lots of things kill grass, but if your lawn dies in the spring, there's a good chance you've got grubs.

Grubs are the larvae of several different varieties of beetles such as the Japanese and Masked Chafer. The beetles sow their eggs in the ground in mid-summer, and the grubs hatch in early fall. The invaders then proceed to eat the roots of your lawn and continue munching on the dormant grass all winter long. It's only when the grass tries to reassert itself and grow in the spring that the damage becomes apparent.