Ow. Ow. Just...ow.

Yes, there's hope. If you have a Weed Hound, you can try getting at least some of that out. I wouldn't recommend Round Up because I can't see how to spot-spray that without taking out way too much lawn.

You can use a cotton glove damped with Round Up to put it on the annua and miss the grass, though. It's a heck of a big job you've got, but do some each day and it'll eventually be done.

Letting that drop seed would be...bad...

On the up side, at least it dies out in July. Unfortunately, that number of seeds spread around means you should be spreading pre-M this fall to stop it, which would preclude any fall reseeding.

I'm hoping somebody else has better ideas because mine don't seem to be particularly workable for that amount of annua.

Ron, Sorry about that ugly poa. If that were my lawn, I would select an area that I could water three times a day with timers, Cut it short, bagging the clippings. Kill everything and re-seed. Spring seeding is difficult but Morpheus did a July seeding with good results, so it must be possible. Next put that renovated lawn on a pre-emergant program. Spread Dimension in both Spring and late Summer. Any poa you see, kill it. Small spots can be filled in with sod patches taken from a less conspicuous area of your lawn or a "sod nursery" planted in your back yard. When you do get some quality grass growing, keep it long to reduce germination of any stray seeds. Bill Hill

Yup. YOu need to get rid of as much poa as possible. Even bare dirt is preferrable to poa. And don't think you can just rip up the tops by hand, leaving some behind. If the poa is still viable it will continue to produce seeds.

I would not give up yet, and I think you're right where you're supposed to be.

Give us your town and state, please, so we can figure out how much better your climate is than our climate is.

1. You had POA, so you needed to start over. Done.
2. YOu rounded up, so the old grass stalks died. Done.
3. You couldn't use a pre emergent in the fall, because that would interfere with your new seedlings. Agreed.
4. You got good germination, and have a bunch of new KBG growing. Agreed.
5. Poa will grow in almost anything, KBG needs fertilizer. A lot of fertilizer. Agreed.
6. Poa is taller than your KBG, at present. Agreed.

I don't find it unusual that all your POA seeds germinated. You didn't kill them, you couldn't. So this year and next, you're going to be putting down a bunch of pre emergent, in hopes that the POA won't germinate. Since it germinates in the fall, start putting the PreM down in August.

Any KBG spreading you get, will be from real spreading not from re seeding. No seeds will grow, because of your (now-declared) war on seeds. Especially POA seeds.

Fertilize. Keep that KBG growing, and spreading.
Mow shorter than usual. The 'compact' or 'short' KBG will love it.
When you mow, have the mower bagger retain the clippings. Those go in the trash. Probably this year only.
Fertilize, again.
Come August, when the POA is dying, the KBG will still be spreading.
In aug and sept, the poa seeds will not germinate, and your Kbg will still be spreading.

In your spare time, this summer, (Ha!) shoot us another pic or two.

Thanks for the advice guys. I'm located in Sayville, NY (south shore of Long Island).

I've thought about killing off the bad areas, but I really think I want to try and salvage what I have. I do have a sprinkler system so watering isn't an issue, and there's a pretty decent stand of KBG hiding under most of the bad areas so if the Poa is going to die off in the summer I might see how well I can control it with Pre-m.

-Rob

I feel for you Rob......I'm in the same boat. I spent a lot of time last year killing the POA and KGB to do a fall reseed. Things were looking good until the spring sunshine warmed up the grass. Then the ugly POA showed up again. I've been selectively using round up (with a glove) and Also bought some "Certainty", (same company that makes round up) Best of luck to you

To death with POA!!!!!!!!

I had about 2500 sq ft of the same density as your second picture next to the house. Since Poa technically is a grass it is next to impossible to remove. I tried flaming this Spring. My first technique was terrible and resulted in a lot of brown grass, but most of it was poa anyway. I now believe the correct technique is to flame sideways instead of putting the heat directly into the ground. You just want to singe the seed heads. That is enough to send the rest of the plant to its death. The point is to get rid of the seeds so it doesn't regerminate. My grass is coming back along with some Poa, but much reduced (about 70% less)so far.

The second part is a decision whether to apply a chemical pre-emergent or reseed. In my case I wish I had held off on the Dimension and practiced a re-seed method. I think I would've had better results. In my case, I have TTTF and I think reseeding with TTPR would've outcompeted the Poa. Since you have KBG, I think a pre-emergent and intensive cultivation of the KBG may be a good plan.

I had so much area and so much Poa I went after a big flamer hooked to a 20# propane cylinder. In hindsight a auto-ignition plumbers torch might be a better tool for the job as it would be a little easier to control.

I'd be interested to know what your seeding rate was last fall. My theory is that low seeding rates invite a huge Poa outbreak.

Morpheus did a July seeding with good results,

Early August, actually, which is a different prospect in Pennsylvania than July is. I compensated by increasing seeding rates by 30%, watering 4 times daily very lightly, and staring at it accusingly when it was slow to sprout.

Mow shorter than usual. The 'compact' or 'short' KBG will love it.

This is about the only recommendation I wouldn't agree with. Your KBG wants sun, which is food, which it won't get if you mow it shorter. Yes, the annua will overshadow it a bit, but that would happen short or long.

My response has been to stay at 3 1/2" and give the KBG as much sunlight as it can get to encourage it to grow strongly and, eventually, spread.

I seeded at 3lb/1000 sq ft with a slit seeder when I renovated.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the flame method to remove the poa. Does burning the seedheads kill off the entire plant or just burn off the seeds to help limit future germination?

Thanks,
Rob

Though I liked a lot of the previous advice, I am also skeptical on mowing shorter. I am new to dealing with Poa Annua and certainly don't have any expert advice to share, but I have recently read that this plant can still drop seed even when mowed to golf green heights. Which I guess is part of what makes it so popular! ;-)

Seriously, I'm just not sure that mowing height will have any serious effect on this plant or its seeding, and given that, I am inclined to mow my desired grass at the height that will work best for it, and deal with the Poa in other ways.

The mowing shorter recommendation goes against everything I've done up until this year. I was a great fan of leaving the height grow to 4", then mowing it down to three.

Then, last fall, the Magnificent Twenty of us put in these premium cultivars for new lawns (Mag 3 mix, more or less, for most of us, but modified a cultivar here, a cultivar there), and we (and the original poster) now have 'dwarf' species, or 'compact' species of bluegrass, starting with Midnight or Midnight II.

I fear that 'compact' or 'dwarf' means 'short', at least in the short term (first full year of establishment). What the OP needs at present is a way to get the new grass spreading out, even if it's at the cost of somehow 'less than optimal' if optimal means more height, more roots, but less spreading this year.

I believe a thread here in the forum supports this strategy. Everybody seems to be encountering (in April) a low-growth habit, and a need of fertilizer. We know that KBG is a 'heavy feeder', requires more fert than other lawns. We know that new KBG lawns require even more fert than that, although some of us aren't going to put it down that heavily. We should.

That new KBG is coming in pretty low to the ground. Lower than we are used to. I think the literature will support the proposition that the new lawn should be mowed shorter than we would have mowed our old KBG lawns, last year, if what we want this year is maximum 'spreading' as opposed to maximum 'taller'.

No question the poa can survive. It will be there til the heat of summer. But the dose of pre-M in summer, followed by another dose of pre-M in the fall, should go far toward seeing that those poa seeds don't germinate this fall (and I think that most of us know that poa germinates in the fall, not in the spring). At that point, what's left on that lawn? With luck, brand new KBG, at the end of its first full season. With maximum spreading. Since there isn't going to be much spreading in the heat of July and August, that's got to be done this spring, when that grass stand is immature.

Which prompted the somewhat counter-intuitive advice to mow it shorter than usual, this first full season. I do believe that all of us, in the Magnificent Twenty are going to end up mowing shorter than we're used to, say, up to the 4th of July. We'll have to wait until the reports come in, to see if that's the case.

But the Original Poster can't kill poa now, he's got to wait til fall, and kill the seeds, with the pre-emergent. And he's got to have a pretty well spread out stand of new KBG there, when the poa goes away.

Oh, I see what you mean. And I'm glad you said that, because I have a shameful confession that maybe I'm not as ashamed of now: I have been mowing fairly low already (2" or 2.25" I forget exactly). The blade is not hitting all of the grass yet, but it takes a little more off each time, and I don't plan on raising it until June or so. I've been doing this because I read somewhere that mowing KBG encourages "tillering," and though I'm not sure that is the correct term, I think the idea is lateral growth.

OK, two confessions: against all of the advice on this site I have been fertilizing fairly heavily already - 1.6 lbs. synthetic nitrogen per 1000 sq. feet as of yesterday. My "reasoning" was that, given the poor fertility of my yard, the fact that I keep reading that my new grass needs a lot of food, especially in its first year, and my own skepticism about just to what extent spring feeding *really* harms a lawn if it is otherwise well maintained, I decided that getting some significant amount of material down early was in my case worth the tradeoffs. If it works out, I expect to be able to do it differently next year.

So it sounds like, by accident, without even considering Poa in any of this, I stumbled onto a plan that may actually put some pressure on it.

Thanks again for posting that! I'd love to hear what others say too.

Mr. Anderson,
I can only offer you what I have experienced so far this spring on the flaming technique. My torch is 500k BTU. Good for weeds in a driveway, probably more than required for burning Poa. I started out using the heavy handed approach. Standing over the Poa with the torch directed straight down into the seed heads, singing burn, baby, burn. That was the wrong technique because it damaged too much of the surrounding fescue. Now I just turn the torch down as low as possible, keep the flame parallel to the ground and try to just singe the seed heads by using a spray painting motion back and forth over the seed head. It does not take very much at all which is why I would say now that a hand held torch like a plumber uses to sweat copper would be much more handy. Using the latter technique I get brown spots similar to using a squirt of roundup, but in about 2 weeks I get back green growth of good grass. Some poa is coming back too, but at a much reduced seed head and not nearly as unsightly as what I had before. I treat before I mow and if I could keep my old bagging mower running I would bag, but that is not always the case.

My thought in trying this technique was to limit the future germination of poa, because I plan to reseed again this fall at a much higher seed rate (7# versus the 2.5# I did last fall). My hope was that the heat would act like the height of summer and kill off the poa. I am not seeing much spreading of the Poa even though I am mulch mowing. So I have to assume that the combination of burning the seed heads and the pre-m I put down are helping. It will probably be a few more weeks to really tell if the heat kills all of the plant. I'm basing that on observation and comparison of how much Poa was there before I flamed and how much is there as the TTTF begins to recover. KBG may react differently, but you could certainly try a small area as a test first.

Besides, I could use the flamer to start the charcoal and melt ice off the stoop, while the chemicals were awfully expensive and outside my reach.

I am one of the Mag 20 as philes put it and my Mag 3 is doing well. I too thought that I would be mowing lower (2.5" range) during the first year, but with all the rain in the mid-atlantic (MD/DC) and the 3 apps of SBM so far, my lawn is taking off. In the fall, I had slow germination (45 - 60 days) in some areas where I only had ground cover before top growth stopped. This spring, however, the yard has taken off - weeds crept into some of the thin spots, but they are quickly getting choked out by the spreading KBG. I've mowed 4 times this year starting around 2.25" raising the height to 3.5" during the next 2 mows. Some of the ground cover areas did not get mowed until the 3rd cut, but they have caught up and the spreading has been great. I left the mower at 3.5" for the most recent cut, but I'm headed to 3.75" or 4" for the next one.

I think as long as you are regularly cutting the lawn - regardless of mowing height, you will experience good tillering. My lawn is still spreading as I keep raising the mower height and is far thicker and more dense than my fescue lawn ever was.

The OP should probably just practice good maintenance (infrequent watering and taller mowing) for now and get aggressive with the pre-M in late summer and the fall to combat the poa annua.