By Ryan Lingenfelter · Cutting Edge Lawn & Landscaping, Garson, Ontario · May 2026
I want to tell you about a visit I made last summer to a property in Greater Sudbury. It was a quote call — she’d found me online, called, and asked me to come take a look at her lawn. Nothing unusual about that.
What stuck with me was what happened when I told her what I found.
She teared up. Not dramatically — just the kind of quiet reaction someone has when they’ve been carrying something frustrating for a long time and someone finally gives them an answer that makes sense. She apologized immediately and said she didn’t know why she was getting emotional about a lawn. I told her not to apologize. Three years of trying to fix something and getting nowhere is genuinely frustrating. Her reaction made complete sense.
The fix itself took me about ten seconds to demonstrate. It cost her nothing. And it was something she could have done herself at any point in the previous three years if anyone had told her what to look for.
Here’s the full story.
She’d been fighting this lawn for three years
She’d moved into the house three years earlier. The lawn had looked decent in the listing photos — nothing spectacular, but solid enough that she hadn’t thought much about it. By her first full summer in the house it was already showing problems. Thin in patches. Pale in colour. Not growing evenly. Weeds moving into the thin spots along the edges and in the open areas near the back fence.
She’d tried everything she could think of. She bought fertilizer — the kind with the four-step seasonal program on the bag — and followed the schedule carefully. She watered more. She watered less. She bought grass seed and overseeded the bare patches. Some of the seed took, but the new grass always came in thin and never filled in properly. She had a lawn care company come out twice the previous season. They fertilized and spot-treated for weeds. The weeds came back. The thinness stayed.
By the time she called me she was genuinely at the point of asking whether she needed to rip the whole lawn out and start over. She’d gotten one quote for a full resod. It was going to cost her just over $3,000. She wanted a second opinion before committing to it.
I told her I’d come take a look. I said I’d tell her honestly what I thought, and that if I thought the resod was the right call I’d say so.
I spotted it in under sixty seconds
I pulled up, got out of the truck, and walked to the lawn. I looked at the grass for maybe twenty seconds. Then I walked over to the shed at the side of the house where she kept her mower and asked if I could take a look at it.
The cutting deck was set to its lowest position. Wheel setting one of six — as low as the mower could physically go. On most residential mowers that setting cuts at somewhere between one inch and one and a half inches. On her mower, based on the model, it was cutting at about an inch and a quarter.
I asked her who had set it there. She said she had, when she first bought the mower, because she thought lower meant less frequent cutting — the shorter you cut it, the longer before it needed cutting again. That logic made sense to her. Nobody had ever told her otherwise.
I crouched down and showed her the grass up close. At an inch and a quarter the blades were so short there was almost no leaf surface left to photosynthesize. The soil was fully exposed to direct sun, which meant it was heating up and drying out far faster than it should. The grass was putting almost all its energy into regrowing the blade instead of developing roots, which meant the root system was shallow — maybe an inch deep in most spots. And because the roots were shallow, every dry stretch hit the lawn hard and fast.
The thinness, the pale colour, the bare patches, the weeds moving in, the seed that wouldn’t establish — every single symptom she’d been dealing with for three years traced directly back to that one wheel setting.
I reached down, lifted the deck lever, and moved it to position four. On her mower that was three inches — where it should have been all along. That adjustment took about ten seconds.
That’s when she teared up.
Why something this simple gets missed so often
She asked me why nobody had told her this before. The lawn care company that had come out — why hadn’t they caught it? The person at the hardware store who sold her the seed — why hadn’t they asked?
Honestly, I think there are a few reasons.
The first is that most lawn care services that come to your property to fertilize or treat for weeds are not there to assess your mowing practices. They show up, they do their service, they leave. If they notice the mower height is wrong, it’s not really in their scope to say anything — they’re not the ones cutting the grass. And in my experience a lot of companies in this industry are focused on selling recurring treatments, not on identifying the root cause of why the lawn isn’t performing.
The second reason is that cutting height is one of those things that seems too basic to be the answer to a serious problem. Three years of struggle, hundreds of dollars in fertilizer and seed and treatments, and the fix is moving a plastic lever one notch? It feels like it can’t be that simple. So people keep looking for more complicated explanations.
But the truth is that cutting height is one of the most powerful variables in lawn health — maybe the most powerful thing the average homeowner directly controls. More than fertilizer. More than watering schedule. More than what seed variety you choose. If you’re cutting too short, you are constantly working against the grass’s ability to recover, establish, and compete with weeds. Every other input you put into the lawn is fighting uphill against that one mistake.
I see it constantly across Greater Sudbury. Not always as extreme as this case, but mowers set lower than they should be — sometimes because the homeowner made a logical guess, like she did. Sometimes because someone told them years ago that short was better and they never questioned it. Sometimes because a previous owner set it and they never changed it.
What her lawn looked like six weeks later
She texted me photos at the six-week mark. I still have them.
The lawn wasn’t perfect — three years of being cut too short doesn’t fully reverse in six weeks. But it was visibly, meaningfully better. The colour had shifted from that stressed pale yellow-green to a proper mid-green across most of the yard. The thin areas had started to fill in as the grass finally had enough blade length to photosynthesize properly and put energy into lateral growth. The bare patches along the edges had new grass coming through — not from any new seed, just from existing plants finally spreading the way they’re capable of when they’re not being cut back to nothing every week.
She texted me one line with the photos: “I can’t believe this is the same lawn.”
She didn’t need a resod. She needed someone to look at her mower.
I followed up with her in fall. The lawn had continued to improve through the rest of the season. She did one round of overseeding in late August to help fill in the spots that had been bare the longest, and by the time the season ended the lawn looked better than it ever had since she’d moved in.
Total cost of the fix: zero dollars.
What to check on your own lawn right now
If your lawn has been struggling — thin, patchy, pale, weedy — before you spend money on anything else, go check your mower deck height. Here’s how:
- Find the wheel height adjustment on your mower — usually a lever or dial near each wheel, or a single central lever on newer models.
- Check what setting it’s on and look up in your mower manual what cutting height that corresponds to. If you don’t have the manual, most manufacturers have them online.
- If you’re cutting below three inches, move it up. For most lawns in Greater Sudbury, three to three and a half inches is where you want to be from late May through August. For shaded areas or lawns with heavier clay soil, lean toward three and a half.
- Don’t drop the height in summer because the lawn looks long between cuts. Long grass in heat is protecting itself. Let it.
That’s it. Check the setting, adjust if needed, and give it six weeks before you judge the results. For a lot of lawns in Sudbury, that one change will do more than anything else you could spend money on.
If you’ve made that change and the lawn is still struggling, then there’s likely something else going on underneath — compaction, thatch, drainage — and that’s worth having someone come look at properly. But start with the mower. It’s free, it takes ten seconds, and you might be surprised what it does.
If you want me to come take a look at your lawn and tell you honestly what I think is going on — give me a call. No charge for the visit, no obligation to book anything.
📞 705-507-6787 | Get a free quote online
— Ryan Lingenfelter
Owner, Cutting Edge Lawn & Landscaping
Garson, Ontario · 705-507-6787
