How To Keep Dog Pee From Killing Grass (Dog Urine Spot Prevention)

Dogs love being in the garden, running around, and playing, but they also use it to do their business which is completely natural. The unfortunate part is when your grass turns brown from their urine, so how can we prevent this from happening?

You can stop your grass from dying by watering those areas often, training your dog, encouraging them to drink more water, and not fertilizing those spots of grass. You can apply NaturVet GrassSaver Gypsum Soil Conditioner to eliminate the nitrogen in the soil or replant urine-resistant grass. 

It is not necessarily your dog’s fault that they cause your grass to go brown because when they have to go, they just have to. Fortunately, a few things can help prevent your grass from dying, so let’s look at what you can do.

How To Prevent Dog Urine From Killing My Grass

The first thing we need to clarify is what in the urine causes your grass to go brown; it is not how acidic the urine is but instead due to the high nitrogen content. So we know that nitrogen is a very healthy nutrient for our lawn, we find it in fertilizers, but if it is applied in large concentrations onto the grass, it can cause it to die.

Since we know what causes it, what can we do to prevent it from killing our grass?

• Spray the areas on your lawn where your dog has peed with water to try dilute the urine’s nitrogen content. 

• Encourage your dog to consume more water throughout the day; this is beneficial not only for your grass but also for your dog. You can do this by putting water into their food or by exercising them. 

• Try and avoid things like adding salt, supplements, or other additives to their diet to encourage more water consumption or dilute their urine because this can be detrimental to their health.

• When fertilizing your lawn, try and avoid the spots that your dog urinates a lot; this is because their pee contains high amounts of nitrogen, which is also in fertilizer. If you apply fertilizer to these spots, there is a high chance your grass will die.

• Train your dog to urinate in specific areas with gravel or mulch and no grass that can be destroyed. This is a great idea, but it will require patience, and it may not be easy, especially if your dog has been peeing where they like for many years.

What To Do If You Already Have Multiple Brown Spots?

Sometimes it is too late to prevent brown spots as they are already covering our grass. There is one thing you should check, whether your dog is really to blame or whether there is another cause for the brown spots. If you try to pull out the grass that a dog’s urine has destroyed, the root system will still look healthy and strong. 

But if you pull on the grass and the roots easily come out of the soil, this is not a dog urine problem, but rather your grass is suffering from a lawn disease. If you are certain that it is not a disease but instead the urine, then we need first to see whether it is still alive and can be rejuvenated or whether we should just replant new grass. So let us look at what to do if we have brown spots already.

How To Rejuvenate My Grass?

If you think your grass may still be alive, then we can try a couple of things to encourage it to rejuvenate, although if it doesn’t work, then it might mean the grass is dead. Firstly you can start irrigating the brown patches of your grass more, which will help dilute the nitrogen in those areas. 

It is clever to fence off these areas to prevent your dog from urinating on these patches; this will give the grass a chance to recover and grow healthy. You can also try using a product that neutralizes the urine in the soil called NaturVet GrassSaver Gypsum Soil Conditioner. 

This can be applied to the brown grass spots; once applied, cover it or fence it off from your dog to prevent them from urinating there. This product will eliminate the nitrogen and other salts affecting the grass and encourage the grass to grow healthy again.

What To Do If My Grass Is Dead? 

If you have attempted the tips above and realize your grass is completely dead, we need to redo it. This is not necessarily bad as we can do certain things to prevent the new grass from dying. Remove the dead grass patches around your garden and remove about 0.5 to 1 inch of the soil to eliminate the nitrogen-concentrated areas. Replace the soil with new healthy soil in these areas. 

If you don’t want to or cannot remove the soil, you can try the product we spoke about above called NaturVet GrassSaver Gypsum Soil Conditioner; this will help reduce the soil’s nitrogen content. Once the soil is ready and healthy again, you can plant some grass seeds in these areas; it will be best to fence these areas to prevent traffic that can damage the seeds. 

When replanting seeds in these areas, it is important to plant the right grass; you don’t want to plant urine-sensitive grass and go through this process repeatedly. Instead, let’s plant urine-resistant grass to prevent brown spots. 

The best grass to use is tall fescue grass and perennial ryegrass instead of the most susceptible grasses such as Kentucky Bluegrass and Bermuda. Now you have a better chance of saving these spots where your dog normally urinates.

Wrapping Up

Having brown patches all over our lawn doesn’t look very nice. Luckily for you, a few things can be done to prevent this, such as watering more often, training your dog, and encouraging more water consumption by adding neutralizing products to these spots.

If you have got a few dead spots of grass that are just not coming back to life, it is time to replant seeds in these areas; just make sure that you use urine-resistant grass.