As a further preventative, encourage pest-eating birds to visit your property. Birds of the Fringillidae family love to feast on weeds and insects. Cardinals, buntings, goldfinches, juncos, grosbeaks and most varieties of sparrows belong to this family. Sunflowers, portulaca, cosmos and marigolds attract these birds with their seeds but during spring and summer they will consume great quantities of weeds and insects. Remember, in order to attract these birds, you must let the flowers go to seed.
Another preventable measure is to introduce praying mantis and ladybugs to your lawn. These can be purchased from suppliers. The staff of your local nursery can point you in the right direction.
Ants are another pesky problem. They are drawn to dry soil that is low in organic matter. Though they are natural aerators, they damage your lawn’s root system when they build their hills, though the damage is not severe.
To rid your lawn of ants, apply sand, bleach, diatomaceous or bone meal to the colony openings. These substances kill the ants and the colony will be deserted. Commercial traps can be purchased from your local nursery if you feel more comfortable using them but the old favorites work very well.
To avoid an ant problem, be sure to top dress your lawn with compost. This retains moisture and more likely than not, the ant problem will take care of itself.
Sod webworm moths hatch from a caterpillar in thick thatch. The caterpillars skeletonize and cut off blades of grass. If your lawn is thatchy and dry, you may have a problem. One sod webworm can do extensive damage to your lawn.
To check for sod webworms, use a capful of dish detergent in a pail of water. Sprinkle this on a two-foot square area. This will bring webworm caterpillars to the sod’s surface within ten minutes. If they appear, rake them up and drop them into a pail of insecticide soap.
Re-seeding will repel webworms and fill damaged areas as well as crowd out weeds. Aerate and top-dress with endophytic grass.
Caterpillars love lawns that are hot and dry throughout the day. Top-dress with a quarter inch of finely screened weed-free compost, followed with irrigation. This will correct your caterpillar problem.
In order to find the larvae of white grubs, you have to monitor your lawn by lifting the sod. These grubs are C-shaped with soft, white bodies that range from one quarter to three inches. White grubs are root feeders and can cause your lawn to turn brown and die. Your best defense against white grubs is to have a healthy, dense lawn. Aerate, de-thatch and keep surface moisture minimized by watering deeply and infrequently. When weeding, dig out the entire root. Grubs prefer weed roots to grass roots.