Have you ever seen footprints on your lawn? You can see exactly where someone went, but how did the footprints get there? Well we know how they got there, some walked through your lawn, but what exactly caused the footprints to appear.
The footprints are caused when someone walks over frost covered grass. The frost is hard and frozen, and the grass is lush and growing. When the weight of the person or animal walks on the grass, the frost causes the grass to bend and break. The top half of the leaf blade turns black and dies.
The bottom half of the leaf blade is just fine and will continue to grow again once the weather warms up.
But for the current time, there will be black footprints on the lawn that look unsightly. This is by no means damaging to the overall well-being of the turf stand. The leaf blade originates at the crown of the grass plant. The crown is located right at the surface of the soil, so as long the crown is still intact, the grass plant will be able to recover.
So when you say “there are footprints on my lawn!”, don’t worry. There is not much that can be done to stop the footprints from appearing. You can constantly watch your lawn and tell everyone to stay off, but that is unpractical and unreasonable. And really, the footprints do disappear. So the turf is still fine, and we will just have to put up with the footprints until they grow out.
How fast do the footprints show up after walking on the grass. We had black footprints going to our house and to our pole barn. We noticed them in the afternoon. My husband says that he did’t walk on the yard that morning. He thinks someone was at our house that morning while we were gone. I am curios if it takes days or hours to do this.
It does depend on the weather conditions and the the health of the grass for the speed of the spots to appear. Most of the time it is same day (by the afternoon), if not then a day later, but not longer than the next day.
I’ve always wondered why this happened. Thanks for sharing this info!