Experience with Winter foot traffic?

[Green]

I do my best not to walk on the lawn in the Winter, especially in the beginning. But there was some foot traffic today before the snow from the mail person while it was below freezing. For those who have experienced Winter foot traffic...have you always ended up actual dead patches in the Spring in all those areas, which then require reseeding or KBG spreading to fill in again? Not the end of the world, because I'm planning on doing some early Spring glyphosate spot sprays anyway...but just wanted the feedback. Thanks.

[andy10917]

It's not a guarantee, but it happens more than we'd like

[Green]

What are the conditions that seemed to make it worse? Earlier vs. later in the Winter? Colder air temps? Lack of snow cover? Frost vs. no frost? Ground top layer unfrozen versus frozen?

And have you found PR vs. KBG to be any more or less susceptible to cold weather traffic kill?

[andy10917]

I haven't made any of those questions into study areas

[Green]

So, is it something you've tended to just have to deal with generally in the early Spring?

I'm guessing that your strategy with PR was to drop seed, and with KBG maybe a little extra Nitrogen in those spots...? Or would you just leave the spots alone sometimes, even when they were completely dead?

[andy10917]

Many times the blades went black, but the grass recovered from the crowns in the Spring.

[Green]

Good to know. I don't consider that a big deal. We'll see.

[llO0DQLE]

Many times the blades went black, but the grass recovered from the crowns in the Spring.

This. I've read to avoid walking on grass in winter as frozen grass is fragile. When I've had to walk on grass in the winter (due to the wife insisting that I put blow up decor for Christmas), I noticed the same areas go brown in the spring but seem to recover from the crowns as the area greens up after a while albeit a bit later than the rest of the lawn. I still try to avoid or minimize foot traffic as there may be a point of no return.

[71GTO]

Do you think it’s ok to walk on the grass if it warms up? I wanted to mulch now the remaining leaves, but it’s snowed twice now. It is supposed to warm up and I’d like to clean up the last leaves.

[andy10917]

Once the ground freezes, warm days tend to thaw the top half-inch or so, and the thawed soil sort of of is a slippery slop on and frozen underneath. It doesn't behave like the frozen blades on a thawed soil. YMMV...

[Green]

Definitely much more foot traffic (and much colder) this year than usual. So far, I've had a bit of traffic on the main front, traffic on the lamp post hell-strip, all the way up the front hill (about 2/3 over from the driveway) all the way to the tree in in the upper back...with a heavy hose too (oil delivery). His footprints actually sunk into the turf and made impressions that I won't be able to fluff up until probably March. Not to mention, it made some of the snow get displaced/melted along that path, so the turf is now exposed to the cold (0 degrees last night). And then I accidently ran over the very edge of the main front with the car today. I tried covering some of the trafficked areas with extra snow after to replace what got lost. This will definitely be an experiment to see how it turns out.

[andy10917]

You're crossing over into obsessive behavior.

[TimmyG]

Agreed.

I snowblow many paths throughout the lawn including around the house, to the sheds, to the chicken coop, and even up, over, and down a hill for easy access to sledding. Plenty grass gets exposed. It's currently –3°F and dropping. Sure the grass along the paths is browner when the snow melts in the spring, and the ground may even be raised from frost heave, but the effect is short lived, and I've never experienced any lasting damage. The paths are a distant memory by the spring flush.

[Green]

Andy: I was afraid of that. I guess that's why they call us grass nuts sometimes!

TimmyG: It's good to hear that you haven't had totally dead patches in your northern mix from snowblowing those paths.

Thank you both for putting me at ease about it. As you could tell, I was pretty concerned for a little while there, this being the first year with that much foot traffic.

[free_safety]

I walk on my lawn throughout the winter. I have never seen any damage.

[Marinegrunt]

Here's a recent picture of where my lawn gets a lot if traffic in the winter. I go back and forth to the woodpile either with a wheel barrel or a riding mower with cart. Most of the traffic was when it was covered in snow. You can already see a difference in coloe. I did reno the lawn this past fall so it's not as established as most. I'm guessing it will recover okay.

As you can see in the pictures the grass definitely doesn't like a lot of traffic. It was heavy traffic though. I probably had 150-200 lbs of wood in the cart behind the mower. If I remember I'll try and post pictures of the same area in this thread come spring so we can see how it recovers.

With the kids, dog, and especially heating with wood there's no way I can keep traffic off the lawn.

[HoosierLawnGnome]

My experience is similar to MarineGrunt's. Anywhere I drive in the winter or walk, I end up with brown. One year I had a nice set of brown footprints across the lawn when it was really icy.

No worries, spring growth will push it out. Not much to be done unless you don't want to use your lawn all winter. We like building snowmen and having snowball fights too much

[Riverpilot]

The paper person walks across all the lawns around here. Drives me nuts that he can't walk an extra 10' and use the sidewalk, but that's the majority of people. They don't care about peoples lawns. It will grow out in the spring, but it still looks like absolute crap until it does.

That and for some reason the snow/driveway markers I put in, people like to steal those. No idea why.

[HoosierLawnGnome]

We had a burglar walk through our yard to break into my neighbor's SUV on an icy night. Their brown footprints are still visible a month later.