Winnipeggers' lawns struggling to recover from tough winter

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Chris and Jim McDermid pose with new annuals in their yard Wednesday. Despite winter being hard on their yard and having to bring 10 yards of topsoil in to mitigate the damage, they're optimistic about a late-spring planting. Photo Store

Even after the object of Jim McDermids angst had melted away, he was still lamenting the winter of discontent.

Perched on his front veranda, McDermid was pointing around his lawn for remnants of one of the cruellest winters on record. He points to where the snow was more than two metres high. He talks about how his furnace shut down five times because snow plugged the intake. Then theres the large patch of black seeded soil on his front law, part of the 10 yards of dirt the McDermids ordered to spread over the brown spots that pockmark their grass, as well as lawns all across the city.

"The winter before we were in Hawaii," McDermid said. "So every time I was out shovelling snow I was thinking I was in Hawaii the same time the year before. Its been a hard year. We know we get snow but it was more than we could bear."

Winnipeggers are still dealing with the fallout from one of the coldest and longest winters on record.

"We are definitely behind in terms of care and fertilizing lawns," Ryan Buffie, operations manager at Green Drop Lawns, said Wednesday. "Normally, we would have started a month earlier. Its been a noticeable delay for everyone."

As one might expect, given the sudden arrival of summer, business is booming for Buffie and his Green Drop operation. Wednesday morning, his company received 143 calls over a four-hour period, with most of those calls ending in appointments for lawn aerations, seeding and fertilization care.

"The biggest thing people want fixed is the winter kill," Buffie said. "Its been a huge issue this year."

Winter kill is caused from a lot of snow being over one area of grass. When that snow melts during the day and freezes overnight, the repetition of this cycle eventually kills the grass and then leads to snow mould. The only way to resuscitate the grass is to aerate and re-seed the section, and that process takes time to take root.

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Winnipeggers' lawns struggling to recover from tough winter