Get off that hammock! There’s no holiday from lawn care

I’m here to remind you that right now is the ideal time to:

• Sow new grass seed or overseed an existing lawn that has some bare spots. Make sure you get matching seed, and don’t wait until spring — it won’t work then.
• Apply milky spore to your turf if you have a lot of lawn grub damage (lift up a patch of brown grass and you’ll see them if they’re the cause). Milky spore applied now will kill your existing grubs and inoculate your lawn against future grub invasions — perhaps for decades. But don’t wait until spring — milky spore doesn’t work then.
• Improve the drainage in a lawn whose soil has become heavily compacted by using a core aerator to pull plugs out of the turf. But don’t wait until spring. Aeration would damage the lawn then.
• Oh, and anytime over the next month is also when you should plant individual cloves of garlic (six inches deep and six inches apart in your loosest, richest soil) so you can harvest big tasty bulbs next summer. But