Mostly leaving warm-season grass alone, and keeping an eye on Fescue.
Quick answer: Warm-season grass is dormant and brown, it needs almost nothing from you except staying off it when it's frozen. Tall Fescue stays green and may still need an occasional mow on mild days. Winter is also the best time to act on soil test results and get equipment ready before spring.
Winter is the one season where doing less is usually the right call, at least for warm-season grass. Fescue still needs a little attention.
Bermuda, Zoysia, Centipede, and St. Augustine are dormant and brown from the first hard frost until they green back up in mid-to-late spring. There's genuinely little to do, no mowing, no fertilizing, no need to worry about the brown color, it's dormant, not dead, the same way a deciduous tree drops its leaves. The one real thing to watch is foot traffic: walking on frozen or frost-covered dormant grass can damage the crowns, so keep activity off it on hard-frost mornings until it thaws.
Fescue stays green through winter and keeps growing slowly whenever temperatures allow, which in the Piedmont means it may still need an occasional mow on a mild stretch, keep it in its normal mowing height range rather than skipping it entirely. Watch for winter annual weeds like chickweed and henbit, which germinate in fall and grow through the cooler months while competition from the lawn itself is lower.
This is the season to act on a soil test if one hasn't been done yet, since lime and other amendments need lead time to work before spring green-up. It's also a good stretch for equipment maintenance, sharpening or replacing mower blades, servicing anything that sat idle over the growing season, so nothing's a scramble once spring mowing starts back up.
Once the first signs of green-up show up on warm-season grass, it's back to spring lawn care, and the cycle starts over.
No spam, just new lawn and yard guides as we publish them.