The Damage Looked Like Drought. It Was Chinch Bugs.

When a lawn browns out in July, almost everyone lands on the same two answers: it needs water, or it needs feeding. Usually one of those is right. Sometimes it is neither, and something is feeding on the grass from underneath.

What a chinch bug is

Chinch bugs are small insects that live down in the thatch, the spongy layer sitting between the grass you can see and the soil underneath. They do not chew the leaf, so there is nothing obvious to find. They pierce the base of the plant and feed on the sap, and while they feed they interfere with the plant’s ability to move water up from the roots. The grass above them wilts, goes straw-coloured, and stays that way.

An adult is about a fifth of an inch long, black with white markings on the wings. The young, which do most of the feeding, are half the size of a pinhead and start out bright red with a pale band across the back. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

They are easy to overlook, and that is the whole problem

Nobody spots these from standing height. You have to get on your hands and knees, part the grass with your fingers, and watch the soil surface for movement on a warm dry afternoon. Even then, the place to look is not the middle of the dead patch. It is the edge, where the green meets the straw, because the dead centre has nothing left to feed on and they have already moved outward.

So the damage is obvious and the cause is invisible. The lawn gets watered, and watered again, and nothing changes.

Where they turn up

They want it hot, dry and sheltered, so they show up in the same places on almost every property:

• Full sun. South-facing slopes, the strip along a driveway or a walkway, anywhere that bakes in the afternoon.
• Dry, thin areas rather than lush ones.
• Lawns carrying thatch. Thatch is warm, dry and sheltered, which is exactly the habitat they are looking for. A thatchy lawn in full sun is not unlucky. It has been selected.

Thatch works against you twice more, whether or not you ever meet a chinch bug. A thick mat holds rain and irrigation instead of letting it through, so those areas go straw first in a dry summer and read as drought. And it soaks up a treatment before it reaches the soil surface, which is why “we treated it and it came back” is often a thatch report rather than a treatment failure.

When it happens, and when we get ahead of it

Chinch bugs come through the winter as adults and become active as the ground warms. It is the generation that matures over the summer that does the feeding, which is why the brown shows up in the hottest, driest stretch of the year.

Which means the visit that protects the lawn is not the one you call for in August. Round 2 carries surface insect management, and it goes down in late May and June, well before you would see a problem. This visit is preventive, so it goes down before the pressure builds. If a patch shows up between visits, call us and we will come out and look at it before anything else happens.

It is one visit doing several jobs: the same treatment manages army worm, cut worm and leaf hoppers, handles ticks in the lawn itself, and suppresses ants. That last one is the turf, and it is a different thing from our tick program, which treats the shaded, brushy edges where ticks actually live.

Why we push on this one

Because there is no undo button. Once the patches are open, that grass is gone for the season and the fix is no longer a treatment. It is seed, soil and time, in the narrow window at the end of August when seeding actually works here. Getting ahead of it in June costs a fraction of repairing it in September.

If your lawn browns out in the same spot every summer, in full sun, and comes back slower than the rest of the yard after rain, it is worth having someone put their hands in it. Often it is water. Sometimes it is not.

Green Thumb Lawn Service has been caring for lawns in the Bangor area since 1986. See what is in our turf program.