About Lawn Care Guides

Look, I'll be honest with you—I didn't start out as a lawn care expert. My first lawn in 2012 was a complete disaster. Patchy, weedy, half-dead. I was that guy watering at noon in July wondering why everything turned brown.

That failure lit a fire under me. I spent the next three years obsessively learning everything about turfgrass management. I mean everything. I took courses from NC State's Turfgrass Program, killed more test plots than I care to admit, and probably annoyed every extension agent in Wake County with my questions.

Fast forward to today: I've maintained over 50 different lawns across North Carolina's tricky transition zone, testing dozens of grass varieties in real-world conditions. Not in some controlled lab—in actual yards with clay soil, shade trees, and dogs that think the lawn is their personal racetrack.

What makes me different? I'm not selling you a fantasy. When I say Bermuda grass needs 6 hours of sun, it's because I watched my neighbor's lawn thin out to nothing with only 4 hours. When I recommend TifTuf over common Bermuda, it's because I personally measured the difference during the 2022 drought—my TifTuf stayed green for 6 weeks longer.

I grew up mowing golf courses in Augusta. Not the famous one—I wish—but a public course where I learned that grass isn't just grass. The difference between a 419 Bermuda fairway and a bent grass green? Night and day. That's where I learned to obsess over mowing heights, stripe patterns, and why 1/16 of an inch actually matters.

After getting my degree in Turfgrass Science from UGA, I spent 8 years managing athletic fields and high-end residential lawns. You know what I learned? Homeowners get sold a lot of nonsense. 'Apply this magic formula every month!' Meanwhile, the grass doesn't need half of it.

Here's my controversial take: Most homeowners over-fertilize Bermuda grass. I've seen it a thousand times. They dump 6 pounds of nitrogen per year thinking more is better, then wonder why they're fighting fungus and thatch buildup. I run my test lawns on 4 pounds split into small doses, and they look better with way less headache.

I started writing for Lawn Care Guides because I got tired of seeing the same generic advice everywhere. 'Water deeply but infrequently'—okay, but what does that mean in Georgia humidity with afternoon thunderstorms? I'll tell you exactly: 0.75 inches twice a week, skip the irrigation if we get more than 0.5 inches of rain. That's the real stuff.

I spent my Ph.D. years at Texas A&M studying fungal diseases in turfgrass. Thrilling stuff, right? Actually, it was. Because homeowners lose thousands of dollars every year treating the wrong disease with the wrong product at the wrong time.

Case in point: Last summer, a friend called me in a panic about 'brown patch' destroying his St. Augustine. I drove over, took one look, and knew immediately—that wasn't brown patch, it was chinch bug damage. Different problem, completely different solution. He was about to waste $200 on fungicide when he needed $30 of insecticide.

That's why I joined Lawn Care Guides. Lawn disease diagnosis isn't sexy, but it's where homeowners burn the most money. My job is to help you tell the difference between take-all root rot and summer dormancy, between dollar spot and dog urine spots, between actual problems and things that'll fix themselves.

I review every disease and pest section on this site. When we say 'brown patch appears as circular patches 1-3 feet in diameter with a smoke ring border,' that's not copy-pasted from a textbook. That's me describing what I've photographed and analyzed in actual lawns.

I'm the guy who actually uses all the stuff we recommend. Every mower, every sprinkler, every fertilizer spreader—I've personally tested it on real grass, in real conditions, with real problems.

Before joining Lawn Care Guides, I ran a lawn maintenance business in Phoenix for 7 years. Desert lawns are brutal. 115°F temperatures, alkaline soil, hard water full of salts, Bermuda grass that grows 2 inches in a week during monsoon season. If equipment works here, it'll work anywhere.

Here's what I bring to the table: I've burned through 6 different lawn mowers testing cut quality. I've calibrated 15 different spreader models to see which ones actually throw fertilizer evenly (spoiler: most don't). I've run irrigation systems until they fail just to see what breaks first.

When we review a lawn mower and say 'the cut quality was excellent at 2.5 inches but left stragglers at 3 inches,' that's me, with calipers, measuring actual blade performance. When we recommend a specific fertilizer spreader, it's because I've measured the spread pattern width with tarps and weighed the output.