When to Start Mowing Your Lawn in Guelph Each Spring

Two tests before the first cut

• The footprint test: walk across the lawn. If your footprints stay pressed into the ground, the soil is still saturated — mowing now ruts the lawn and compacts the soil for the whole season.
• The height test: wait until the grass is genuinely growing and has reached about 4 inches. The first cut takes it back to 3, keeping the one-third rule intact.

Why cutting too early backfires

Grass wakes up roots-first. Those first warm weeks, the plant is rebuilding its root system after winter — stripping leaf off too early forces it to abandon root growth and start over. The lawns that get buzzed in early April are reliably the ones fighting thin spots by June.

There’s also the mess factor: mowing a wet spring lawn clumps clippings, smears mud, and leaves wheel ruts that stay visible all summer.

What should happen before that first mow

A proper spring cleanup comes first — rake out the winter debris, matted leaves and dead grass so the mower isn’t mulching garbage into the turf. If the lawn needs aeration or overseeding, spring works too, though we do most of ours in fall.

Guelph’s usual timeline, and why it moves

In a typical year the first cuts on our routes happen in the last week of April or the first week of May. A warm, dry April can pull that a week earlier; a cold, wet one (or a late snow, which Guelph does get) pushes it into the second week of May. The calendar is a rough guide — the footprint and height tests are the real trigger. South-facing front lawns on sandy soil in older neighbourhoods like the Ward or St. George’s Park wake up a week ahead of shaded, clay-heavy backyards in the south end, sometimes on the same property.

The first three cuts

• Cut one: take the lawn from about 4 inches to 3. If it came out of winter matted, set the deck a notch higher and open it up gently.
• Cut two: back to the normal 3-inch height. Bag the clippings if you see grey or pink matted patches — that is snow mould, and spreading it around does not help.
• Cut three onward: normal weekly rhythm, sharp blade, mulch the clippings.

Get the mower ready before the lawn is

The first cut of the year with last year’s blade is how lawns end up frayed and white-tipped in May. Sharpen or replace the blade, change the oil, check tire pressure so the deck sits level, and clear the caked grass off the underside of the deck. If you are on a service plan, this is our problem — every machine on our routes starts the season with fresh blades and gets them swapped through the season.

When the first “cut” should be a cleanup instead

If the lawn is covered in leaves that blew in over winter, gravel and sand from the plows, or branches from a March ice storm, mowing first just chops that into the turf. Do the cleanup — rake, blow, edge — then cut. On most of our properties, the first visit of the year is a spring cleanup with the first mow at the end of it, which is the right order and cheaper than two separate trips.