Hi droogie6655321

You should be able to expect germination in as little as 4 or 5 days & possibly as much as 10 to 14 days depending on conditions.

Hopefully you rolled the seed (with a rented water fillable roller) to get good seed-to-soil contact. If it's a small area, just walk all over it.

I plan to keep the ground moist over the next week or so

Yes, moist. Not wet. If you see puddles, it's too much water. Also, keeping the soil moist should be maintained until germination, then you can begin to back off on watering to say, once a day for about a week, then every other day, then twice a week, then once a week.

Often it's thought that lawns don't really need to be watered regularly, but I want to caution you that you'll need to really baby this grass this year. In fact, this is about the worst time of year to seed a cool season grass in Oklahoma, as the new TTTF seedlings you sowed will have a very difficult time making it through the heat of summer. Some will, but expect that likely at least half or more won't. No biggie though! The really best time to overseed this stuff is right after the heat of summer breaks, so be ready to overseed again in fall to get yourself a good stand of turf for next summer's heat.

Also know that you'll have quite a bit of weeds germinating as well as your grass since you're creating those good germinating conditions, but that goes hand in hand with starting new turfgrass. Concentrate on getting a good stand of grass this year, then this fall & next spring you can begin using pre-emergents to reduce germination of annual weeds. If you don't already own a Weed Hound, I'd strongly suggest purchasing one, they're about $20 at HD or Lowes, and you can pull weeds root & all as fast as you can step on 'em!

As far as fertilizers, the best pre-seeding fertilizer to use is alfalfa pellets. They contain trianconatol, a natural fatty-acid growth stimulant. This is good to use for new grassplants/seedlings because they encourage root growth. Apply at 15-20lbs per 1000sqft. Then water it in. (Preferrably 2 weeks before seeding.)

Once the lawn gets established, I think soybean meal is the best to use. Soybean meal has a high (47%) protein content, so less material is needed to provide the lawn with 1lb of N per 1000sqft. (The typical application rate for most chemical synthetic fertilizers is 1lb N per 1000sqft) The typical NPK analysis for soybean meal would be 7-2-1. It's my grain of choice because I get the most "bang for my buck" from it. I use a 50lb bag of it on my approx 3500sqft lawn (14lbs/1000sqft.) every 4 weeks. (My lawn is bermuda, a very heavy feeder.)

I hope my 2 cents helps some.

Good day, Dan

Good advice, and I love the little mowing guy. My mower is actually broken right now. The teeth that move the blade fell out when I removed the blade to sharpen it, and now I have to re-set the blade every time I stop the engine -- which is often, given the thick grass in the backyard.

The manure and peat is soaking up the sprinkler water, so nothing much is pooling. I walk the yard just about every day to check out the garden, so I'll be sure to stomp around in my Doc Martens a little extra today so those seeds can get acquainted with the soil.

As far as the time element goes, I really had no idea when I should overseed, so I just went for it. It seemed like everyone had their own opinion on when the right time was. Some people said fall, some said late summer, some even said winter, so I figured screw it, I'll just do it and see what happens -- that's pretty much my approach to everything.

My goal is mainly to fill in the bare spots (which mainly surround the tree and are also happening where I applied weed and grass killer about 3 months ago). If I can get these filled in, then I can continue fighting individual weeds and maybe then the grass will move in to cover up the bare areas.