Yard Mentor

About Mark Vance

Hey neighbor, I’m Mark Vance. If you’re here because your lawn is patchy, weedy, or just plain confusing, you’re in the right place. Yard Mentor is where I turn the fence-line advice I used to give friends and neighbors into clear steps you can use whenever you’ve got a free hour on a weekend. I’m...

Spring Pre-Emergent Weed Control

If you only do one “grown-up lawn care” task in early spring, make it pre-emergent. It is the closest thing we get to a cheat code for crabgrass and a bunch of other warm-season annual weeds. The trick is simple: pre-emergent does not kill existing weeds. It prevents new ones from successfully...

How Long to Water Your Lawn

If you have ever stood at the window watching sprinklers run and thought, Is this helping, or am I just paying to grow mushrooms? you are not alone. The goal is not to keep the surface wet. The goal is to push water down into the root zone so grass learns to reach for it. For most established...

Year-Round Lawn Fertilization Schedule for Beginners

If you have ever stood in the fertilizer aisle staring at a wall of bags and numbers, you are not alone. The good news is you do not need a complicated program to get a thick, green lawn. You just need to feed your grass when it is actually able to use the nutrients, and you need to apply the right...

Lawn Mowing Heights by Grass Type

If I could change just one habit for most lawns I see, it would be mowing height. Not fertilizer. Not seed. Not some fancy “secret” product. Just cutting at the right height, at the right time, often enough that you are not scalping the plant every weekend. Grass is basically a solar panel with...