Please Help!! I used Scotts Bonus S for my bermuda lawn.
rputtagunta
14 years ago
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WestchesterGrower
14 years agoRelated Discussions
S.O.S. I need help identifying the problem with my lawn
Comments (4)Fungal disease of some kind. How often do you water and for how long? How much rain have you gotten? Are you down in a low area or has that area been covered with brush or something? It looks like it was smothered or otherwise protected from sun and wind for a time. I take an organic approach to lawn fungal diseases. I use ordinary corn meal at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Corn meal attracts another fungus which is predatory on the fungus causing your disease. That fungus is called trichoderma (try ko DER mah). It takes 3 full weeks before you see any improvement. That can be the longest 3 weeks of your life, but after that you should see less yellow and much more deep green. Corn meal is also an organic fertilizer so the dark green color will be very noticeable at the 3 week point. If you have used a chemical fungicide recently, then the corn meal will not work against the disease but it will definitely green up the grass. And yes this is the same corn meal you cook with. You can get it in 50-pound bags at the feed store. And no, it will not attract varmints. Seems like it would but it does not. It does seem to attract birds but they don't eat it. They just come and visit. You can apply corn meal any day of the year, rain or shine, or every day of the year, without fear of hurting anything. If you wan to take a chemical approach, I cannot help you. Our temperatures, humidity, and rainfall are usually outside the recommendations on most chemical fungicides. I gave up on them years ago when I found out how well corn meal works. On another issue you did not ask about: You are mowing your St Augustine much too low. Raise your mower all the way to the highest setting. It will take a month or so before all the grass gets tall enough to be mowed but it eventually will. Mowing it low favors the bermuda which is mixed in with it. Mowing it high can have the effect of choking out the bermuda. Tall St Augustine looks very lush....See MoreScott's lawn care service & my horrendous lawn
Comments (9)Asking a bunch of lawn wackos whether you should hire somebody to take care of your lawn is probably not going to get a lot of endorsements for the lawn service. I used a lawn service for the first year I owned my house and my thinking was much along the same lines as yours. I'd get a professional service to get rid of the weeds and get my grass healthy and after that, I'd be able to do it on my own. I think they said that they used a specific set of chemicals that they sprayed that was tailored to my lawn and its needs, but the truck that they brought around had a big tank on it and they used the same tank on every lawn. When they would come by, they'd leave a notice on the door with recommendations for how often to cut, water, etc based on the conditions they noted in my lawn. But it was the same every time, regardless of the temperature, rainfall, etc. To top it off, the weed situation was no better than before and may have even gotten worse. I also wasn't really comfortable with the little flags they'd put out telling me to keep children and pets off the lawn for a minimum of X days because of the treatments. So I took matters into my own hands. I read things from the extension offices and started doing things that are pretty close to what gets recommended around here. Things started improving. Then I found various lawncare forums and things got even better. One humorous (or maddening?) thing happened a few years after I stopped using the lawn care service. A sprinkler head broke and a section of the lawn went dormant because it wasn't getting any water (the only water lawns get here is from sprinklers). One of the lawncare services pulled up and told me that I had a serious grub problem and needed to treat it right away. They went out to the area that was dormant and started pulling up sections of grass and telling me that it was due to grubs. I knew it was because of lack of water and suggested that as the cause, and they started launching into an explanation of why they knew that wasn't it. I then turned on the sprinkler in that section and showed them that it wasn't working, but they still tried to tell me it was grubs. Anyway, the main things you want to do are the following: Water deeply and infrequently. Apply an inch of water a week, but only water once a week if you can (in the desert, I often have to water twice a week, or once every 5 days, anyway). Adjust the amount (or the frequency) you water for any rainfall. This has a couple of benefits. First, it promotes deep roots, so the grass can better deal with periods of drought. I call grass a lazy plant, because it will only put down roots as deeply as it needs to for the water it gets. If the top inch of soil is always wet, the grass will have roots that are only an inch deep. Second, letting the ground dry between waterings will discourage weed seeds from germinating, because they need moisture to germinate. Mulch mow and mow at the highest setting of your mower and never cut more than 1/3 of the blade at one time. Mulch mowing returns water and nutrients to the soil and improves the health of the soil. It doesn't contribute to thatch and can actually contribute to getting rid of it. Mowing at the highest setting helps to make the grass stronger because it gives more surface area for photosynthesis. It also helps shade the surface so the roots are better able to deal with heat and drought. Also, it helps keep weeds from thriving because the weeds need sunlight. Fertilize once in the spring and twice in the fall. If you're using weed killers, don't use the weed and feed products (another reason I don't like the services--the one size fits all means they fertilize and kill weeds at the same time). Instead, spot spray weeds that you see sprout up. As for the lime, did they do a soil test? If not, there's no way to know whether lime is needed. Some areas tend to have low pH soils, but you don't know what the prior owner did. The prior owner may have applied lime regularly and heavily and raised the pH too high. If so, I wouldn't do anything to lower the pH because that will happen anyway, but you need to know if it needs lime before adding it. I guess my comment on the grubs is similar. Do you have grubs? If not, the grub treatment makes a lot more sense for the lawn service than it does for you....See MoreScotts Bonus S Southern Weed & Feed on Bermuda grass
Comments (2)That might be the most perfect poster picture ever of one kind of bermuda invading the other kind. What you have is Tif 419. What the invader looks like is all the other bermuda - common bermuda. It looks like someone seeded the common into the Tif. The only way to get rid of the invader, if it is bermuda, is to kill the entire lawn. Does the invader get flowers on it a few days after mowing? Can you let the grass grow until it flowers and post a picture of the flowers? That will help to identify it. I don't think you can hurt bermuda with a weed n feed product. You wasted the herbicide, though, by not following directions. Don't feel bad. 99.999999999999999999% of everyone makes that mistake. Seriously. All the lawn forums tell people to just forget about weed n feed products because they won't work for most anyone. You don't get any herbicide and you don't get any fertilizer out of it. And besides, the weed you have would not be touched by the herbicide in a weed n feed. Those are more for clover, dichondra, oxalis, and other broadleaf weeds. In the future if you want to fertilize, use a fertilizer. If you want to kill weeds, use a herbicide. Don't mix the two and expect to get good results. Find the Bermuda Bible online and memorize it. This time of year you should be watering once per month unless you are catching up from a loooong dry spell like we are in Texas. I let mine go too long and am watering pretty deeply to get some moisture in the soil. Where do you live?...See MoreBermuda Lawn Not Greening - Please Help!
Comments (5)The lawn is unevenly green because you are watering too frequently and too long. You should be watering 1 inch all at one time, not split up. Splitting it encourages shallow rooting. Deep rooting will help all around. Here is a picture showing the difference between watering every day and watering once a week in the hottest heat of summer. All the lawns in the neighborhood water a few minutes on a daily schedule. The green one waters 3/4-inch once a week. Deeper roots from deep watering brings up nutrients held deeper in the soil. Thanks to morpheuspa for posting his lawn pics many years ago. These are Kentucky bluegrass lawns in Pennsylvania; however, the same holds true for bermuda in the south. Back off on your watering to green it up. If temps are in the 80s to 90s, you should not be watering every week. Wait until the temps are in the 90s consistently to water once a week. Given Houston's rain profile, you might not need to water much at all. I live in Bandera where we're having a relatively dry spring. I just watered my St Augustine lawn for the first time this week. Y'all get a lot more rain, so I would not be watering it yet. You should have fertilized after the second mowing this spring. Then you can fertilize once a month to 6 weeks for the rest of the growing season. Ideally you would be mowing much lower. If your soil surface is uneven, then you raise the deck until it doesn't scalp. Bermuda does not mind being scalped at any time, so don't worry about that. Routine scalping bermuda causes the grass blades to grow horizontally instead of vertically. That's how putting greens work. But you have to have a level surface to do that. If you would like to have a more level mowing surface, and who doesn't, search this forum for topics on lawn leveling. You should find posts about using sand and a drag to level the sand. If not I can point you in the right direction. Basically it's fertilize heavily, water deeply, scalp, remove the fluff, sand the low spots, settle the sand and resand as necessary, and then stand back. Do this with some beefy friends, beer, and pizza. It's a workout. With bermuda you can level any time the ground is hot. July and August are perfect. You don't ever need to aerate or dethatch. Having said that, professional turf farmers will slice bermuda in the spring. That is much like dethatching but they use a sharp blade rather than wires. Slicing the surface runners encourages bermuda the green up and "densify."...See Moredougt
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