Lawn Care & Landscaping in Austin, TX

Austin, Texas is one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, and with that growth comes an increasing demand for professional lawn care and landscaping services. Whether you live in a classic South Austin bungalow, a new construction home in Pflugerville, or a luxury property in Westlake Hills, Grass Works has the expertise and equipment to keep your lawn looking its best year-round.

Austin’s unique climate — characterized by hot, dry summers, mild winters, and unpredictable spring rainfall — demands a lawn care approach that’s tailored to local conditions. We understand the challenges of Austin’s clay and limestone soils, the city’s water restrictions, and the specific needs of the grass varieties most common in Central Texas: St. Augustine, Bermuda, Zoysia, and Buffalo grass.

Our Austin lawn care services include weekly and bi-weekly mowing, edging, trimming, fertilization, weed control, and seasonal cleanups. We also offer complete landscape design and installation and licensed irrigation services throughout Austin.

Austin soil: why the east side and the west side need different care

The Balcones Fault runs right through Austin, and it splits the city into two very different growing conditions. East of roughly I-35 you are on Blackland Prairie — deep, dark clay that holds water, swells and cracks with the seasons, and compacts under foot and mower traffic. West of it, out toward Westlake, Bee Cave and the Hill Country, you are on the Edwards Plateau: thin soil over limestone, fast-draining and strongly alkaline.

Those two soils fail in opposite ways. Clay lawns hold moisture near the surface, which encourages shallow roots and makes brown patch worse in a wet fall — they benefit most from core aeration and top dressing to open the soil up. Limestone lawns drain almost too well and lock up iron, which is why St. Augustine on the west side so often goes pale yellow between the veins while the grass next door looks fine. That is iron chlorosis, not a watering problem, and pouring more water on it makes it worse.

What you can actually water, and when

Austin Water has been in Conservation Stage since September 2025, after the Highland Lakes recovered. Under Conservation Stage, automatic irrigation systems are limited to one assigned day per week and hose-end sprinklers to two days per week, in both cases only before 10 a.m. or after 7 p.m. Your assigned day depends on your service address, and Austin Water publishes a lookup tool for it.

One deep soak on your assigned day beats several light ones. Light, frequent watering keeps roots in the top inch of soil, which is the worst place for them to be in an Austin August. If your system finishes a zone with water running down the driveway, the answer is usually cycle-and-soak — two or three shorter starts with a rest between — rather than a longer single run.

The grasses we actually see in Austin yards

St. Augustine dominates the older, shadier neighborhoods — Hyde Park, Allandale, Travis Heights, Crestview — because it handles shade better than anything else that survives here. It is also the most disease-prone, and the first to show brown patch when nights turn warm and humid in the fall.

Bermuda is the default on newer full-sun lots north and east of the city. It is tough and drought-hardy, but it will not tolerate shade, and it goes fully dormant and tan in winter.

Zoysia sits between the two: better shade tolerance than Bermuda, better disease resistance than St. Augustine, slower to establish and more expensive to install.

Buffalo grass is the genuinely low-water option, but it wants full sun and open space, and it does not take heavy foot traffic.

An Austin lawn year, roughly

• Late February to early March — pre-emergent goes down before soil temperatures hit the mid-60s, which is what stops crabgrass before it starts. Miss this window and you are treating weeds all summer instead of preventing them.
• April and May — the growing season starts in earnest. This is the right time for core aeration and top dressing on compacted clay, and for sod if you are replacing a lawn.
• June through September — mow high. Taller grass shades its own roots and holds moisture. St. Augustine wants roughly 3 to 4 inches, Zoysia 1.5 to 2.5, Bermuda 1 to 2. Scalping a lawn in an Austin summer is the fastest way to lose it.
• October and November — a second pre-emergent for winter weeds, and the window when brown patch shows up in St. Augustine after warm, damp nights.
• December through February — dormancy for the warm-season grasses. This is the right time for tree and hedge work, bed cleanups, and irrigation repairs before spring demand.

Where we work in Austin

We maintain properties across central and greater Austin — Hyde Park, Allandale, Crestview, Brentwood, Rosedale, Tarrytown, Clarksville, Zilker, Travis Heights, Bouldin Creek, Barton Hills, South Lamar, Circle C, Steiner Ranch, Westlake Hills, Mueller, Windsor Park, Cherrywood, the Domain and North Burnet — along with the surrounding metro. If you are not sure whether you are in our area, call and ask; the answer is usually yes.

Your assigned watering day, and what it costs to get it wrong

Austin Water has been in its baseline Conservation Stage since 2 September 2025, and the schedule is more specific than most homeowners realise. Automatic in-ground irrigation systems get one day a week. Even-numbered addresses water Thursday, odd-numbered addresses water Wednesday. Hose-end sprinklers and drip irrigation get two days: even addresses Thursday and Sunday, odd addresses Wednesday and Saturday. In both cases the permitted window is midnight to 10 a.m. or 7 p.m. to midnight. Hand-held hose watering, tree watering by soaker hose or bubbler, vegetable gardens and reclaimed water are exempt from the schedule entirely.

Violations are reported through 3-1-1 and carry fines of up to 1,000 dollars per incident. In practice the most common way an Austin homeowner ends up cited is not defiance but a controller nobody has opened since the house was built, still running a three-day-a-week program from an era when that was legal. Checking the controller costs nothing. Ignoring it can cost four figures.

Austin’s tree rules reach further than most homeowners expect

On a residential lot of one or two dwelling units, any tree 19 inches or more in diameter, measured four and a half feet off the ground, is a Protected Tree, and every species counts. At 24 inches and a listed species — all oaks, pecan, bald cypress, elms, Texas ash, Texas madrone, bigtooth maple and the walnuts among them — it is a Heritage Tree, and removal is prohibited without a variance. Measure the circumference at four and a half feet and divide by 3.14 to get the diameter; a 60-inch circumference is the 19-inch threshold.

What surprises people is the breadth of what counts as work requiring a permit. A Tree Ordinance Review Application is required not only to remove a tree but to prune 25 percent or more of the living crown, or to disturb the critical root zone — a circle whose radius in feet equals the trunk diameter in inches, so a 24-inch tree has a 24-foot protected radius. The code defines removal broadly enough to include excessive root damage and excessive pruning, which means a tree can be legally “removed” while still standing, and the owner cited for it. Unauthorised removal can be charged as a Class C misdemeanour. Even a dead, diseased or clearly hazardous tree needs an approved permit before it comes down, though the fee is waived for qualifying applications. Mitigation runs one inch planted per inch removed for Protected Trees and three-to-one for Heritage Trees, or 200 dollars per inch into the Urban Forest Replenishment Fund.

None of this is a reason to avoid tree and hedge work — it is a reason to have it done by someone who knows where the line is.

Rebates that pay for a large share of the work

Austin Water runs one of the more generous residential conservation rebate programmes in Texas, and most homeowners we talk to have never used it. Current residential offers include up to 3,000 dollars for converting turf to a native planting bed under the WaterWise Landscape rebate, up to 1,000 dollars toward improving the efficiency of an existing irrigation system, up to 5,000 dollars for rainwater harvesting depending on storage capacity, up to 120 dollars for mulch, compost and core aeration under Landscape Survival Tools, and smaller amounts for hose-end timers and graywater reuse.

Two conditions catch people out. The WaterWise Landscape rebate requires pre-approval before any work begins — start first and the money is gone — and at least 75 percent of the area being converted has to be healthy turf to start with. Plants may only be installed in the spring and autumn windows, never in summer. That last rule aligns neatly with what is agronomically correct anyway, and it is one more reason to schedule landscape work for October rather than July.

What goes wrong in an Austin lawn, and when it goes wrong

Most of what looks like drought stress in an Austin lawn is not drought stress. Four problems account for the large majority of calls, and each has a season.

Chinch bugs arrive with hot, dry summer weather and run three to five overlapping generations a year. They produce expanding, irregular patches of dying grass with a halo of yellow-orange at the edge, worst in full sun along driveways and sidewalks where reflected heat concentrates. The diagnostic that separates them from everything else: affected grass does not respond to water or fertiliser. Confirm with a flotation test — cut the bottom from a coffee can, push it an inch or two into the turf at the edge of a dying patch, fill it with water and count what floats. More than two bugs in a four-inch can means an actionable population. There is no preventative treatment, so scouting weekly through summer is the whole strategy.

Take-all root rot is Austin’s signature disease, because the fungus favours alkaline soil above pH 7 and Austin soil is alkaline citywide. It spreads through autumn, winter and spring at soil temperatures around 60 to 65 degrees, then shows itself in spring and early summer as the grass breaks dormancy: irregular thinning patches anywhere from one foot to twenty across, yellowing foliage, and — the giveaway — short, blackened, rotten roots with stolons that lift straight out of the soil. Fungicides work only preventatively, in spring and autumn, before symptoms appear. The durable fix is cultural: acidify toward neutral with sphagnum peat moss at one to two bales per 1,000 square feet, keep nitrogen under four pounds per 1,000 square feet per year, water deeply, and fix drainage.

Large patch, the disease most people still call brown patch, is the autumn problem. It appears as circular patches with yellow to orange borders when soil temperature drops below 70 degrees on wet ground. The clean distinction from take-all: with large patch the leaf blades rot and pull easily from green stolons while the roots stay white and healthy, and the patch is round rather than irregular. It rarely kills the plant. Preventative fungicide when soil temperatures sit between 50 and 70 degrees in autumn is the effective timing; spraying after the patches appear mostly wastes product.

White grubs follow June beetle flights, doing their real damage from midsummer into autumn. Turf browns in irregular patches and, because the roots are severed, lifts like carpet. Treat only above five to ten grubs per square foot; below that, the lawn outgrows them. Fall armyworms are the wildcard — they can strip a lawn in two days, because the final two larval stages eat 85 percent of everything consumed. A soap flush, two or three tablespoons of dish detergent per gallon poured over a three-by-three-foot square, brings them up within a minute.

The numbers behind the Austin lawn calendar

Camp Mabry’s 1991–2020 normals give Austin 36.25 inches of rain a year, but the distribution matters more than the total. May is the wettest month at 5.04 inches, followed by October and June. July, at 1.96 inches, is the driest month of the growing season, and it arrives alongside the heat: Austin now averages 29 days a year at or above 100 degrees on the recent normals, against a long-term average of 15, and 123 days at or above 90. The average first freeze is 1 December and the average last is 15 February, though south-east Austin near Bergstrom sees roughly three times as many freezing days a year as Camp Mabry does — a real intra-city difference. The 2023 USDA map places Austin in Zone 9a, up from 8b.

Those numbers set the calendar. Pre-emergent goes down when soil holds 55 degrees for four or five consecutive days, typically late February, and again at 70 degrees in early autumn for winter annuals. First fertiliser waits until the lawn has been mowed twice on real growth, not the first warm week. The last nitrogen application goes down four to six weeks before the historic first frost, which in Austin means finishing by roughly mid-October. Nothing gets fertilised in July or August, because feeding stressed grass in a 100-degree week does harm rather than good.

Where the clippings actually go

Austin Resource Recovery collects yard material weekly in the green composting cart, and the rule most often broken is the bag. Yard trimmings go in the cart loose or in paper lawn-and-leaf bags only — material set out in plastic bags is collected as trash and billed as extra trash. Branches must be under five feet long and three inches in diameter to go in the cart; anything larger belongs in an on-demand brush collection, which has to be booked by appointment and is a separate service from bulk collection. Up to 15 extra items may be set beside the cart each week, in paper bags or a reusable container under 34 gallons and 50 pounds.

For volume beyond that, Austin Water’s Hornsby Bend plant on FM 973 takes yard trimmings and large brush free from Austin and Travis County residents, Monday to Saturday, photo ID required. It is composted into Dillo Dirt. What you cannot do, in most years, is burn it: Travis County spends much of the year under a burn ban, and inside the city limits outdoor burning is separately restricted regardless.

South and west Austin: the aquifer under the lawn

If your property sits south of the Colorado River in the Barton Springs Zone, what happens on the lawn does not stay on the lawn. Six creeks — Barton, Williamson, Slaughter, Bear, Little Bear and Onion — recharge the Barton Springs segment of the Edwards Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to more than 60,000 people, and water moves through that karst system at up to four miles a day. There is no filtration between a storm drain and the aquifer.

Austin does not regulate residential lawn fertiliser; its approach is the voluntary Grow Green programme rather than an ordinance. But the absence of a rule is not an argument for carelessness in a watershed that fast. Applying only what a soil test says the lawn needs, keeping granular product off hard surfaces, and sweeping rather than hosing driveways are the practical measures, and they cost nothing. Austin sits in what the National Weather Service calls Flash Flood Alley, roughly a tenth of the city is in the floodplain, and in older neighbourhoods with undersized drainage the water ponds in yards and streets long before it reaches a creek.