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Help - dying grass

14 years ago

Hello.

I put down new tall fescue sod last fall. It over-wintered great, and spring was also going really well.

We had a run of very wet weather and humidity here in Georgia recently, and areas have been turning brown, and chunks of grass are coming out in patches.

I thought it was brown patch and called Chemlawn, they told me it wasn't a fungus becuase it would smell like cat pee (no joke). The lawn is fertilized regularly.

I think it's too early for grubs. I mow my lawn at 3 inches. I put down some of the ant, flea and tick granules from Home Depot as Chemlawn told me it may be something eating it.

If I run my rake over the patches, the grass comes out very easily.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as my beautiful sod is falling apart. :-(

Here is a picture:

{{gwi:95770}}

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Comment (1)

dchall_san_antonio
14 years ago
It's a fungus that doesn't smell like cat pee. In all the years I've been on the lawn forums, I've never heard of anything smelling like cat pee. But I hear repeatedly about ChemLawn people who couldn't find their butt with both hands.

You can either try to figure out which fungus it is, get the right stuff, wait for the right time to apply it and hope it works; or you could find some ordinary corn meal and apply that at 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Moisten the corn meal and in 3 weeks the grass should be turning green again. This is assuming you have not used any other chemical fungicide, sulfur, baking soda, or sulfates in the past month or so. There's probably no way to find out what ChemLawn used. If you cannot find corn meal, cracked corn will work, too. Look at a feed store. Corn meal works on several of the popular lawn diseases.

You may suffer some bare spots and/or weeds this summer. In the fall I would suggest you overseed with a mix of two or three Elite Kentucky bluegrasses. If you had a KBG mix in the lawn you have now, the KBG would refill the bare spots. Fescue cannot do that.
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