Usually, by the time the calendar flips to October the nights are cool and the days carry a hint of Fall. The trees are bursting with colour, the buzzing of lawn mowers is less frequent, and the splashing in a neighbours' pool is a distant memory of Summer---but not this year.
At a time when most lawns have recovered from July/August stress (drought/dormancy/ chinch bug, etc.), the damage is still visible, and the reclamation far from evident.
As I write this, we have gone 21 days without rain, have daily temperatures pushing 30 C including new record highs for this time of the year. If you haven't been watering your lawn religiously (2x a week for an hour each.) chances are, you have nothing but concrete for soil and any attempts to get water to your parched grass is useless.
The few mechanical core aerations we have done, have pulled up only cores of dust, and we are still waiting for the fall fertilizer to kick-in, in most cases.
You don't have to have inground sprinklers to combat the dryness, just a few minutes to turn on a manual sprinkler and then turn it off an hour later. Don't get lulled into a false sense of security when the rains come. The robust 100 plus millimetres of June and July can easily turn into less than 70 mil over the last TWO months like it has.
Now you're left with a tale of two lawns---one watered, and one not.
