Find out how much water your lawn needs and how to deliver it: inches per week, days per week, and how many minutes to run each zone (with cycle-and-soak so it soaks in instead of running off).
About this tool: how long should you water a lawn?The Rest of the Lawn
How much nitrogen your grass wants over a year, split into feedings that land in the 0.5 to 1.0 lb window, in pounds of the bag you actually own.
Open the calculatorPounds of seed for a new lawn or an overseed, the window to sow it in, and how to water it through the first month.
Open the calculatorWhether the lawn needs lime at all, and how many bags of which kind if it does, worked out without a soil test.
Open the calculatorTwo sprinklers running the same half hour deliver very different amounts. Cool-season lawns want 1 to 1.5 inches a week in a northern summer, rain included. The same grass further south loses more to heat and wants up to about 2 inches, which is why this tool asks for your zone. Warm-season grasses want 20 to 40% less than a cool-season lawn in the same place, buffalograss least of all.
Set straight-sided tins around the zone, run it 15 minutes, average the depths, multiply by 4 for inches per hour. Output ranges from 0.25 to over 1.5 in/hr, so a copied schedule is often four times wrong.
Two or three soakings a week, not a little daily. Aim to wet the top 6 to 8 inches: a screwdriver should push in that far an hour after watering.
4am to 9am. Evening watering leaves blades wet overnight, which invites fungal disease.
Brown is survival, not death. Half an inch every two or three weeks keeps the crowns alive. What kills a dormant lawn is being repeatedly half-watered awake.