St Augustine grass problem. San Antonio,Tx
Hello, I recently just laid St Augustine sod September 14, 2020. First time home owner and new to lawn care. I am worried about my newly installed sod dying during winter and am wondering if the browning in my front yard is normal. The side of my house the dead patches have not been replaced and do get sun, but I don’t think very much sun all day, maybe the minimum 3-4 hours of sun that is needed. I did not put anything for the weeds and do have weeds seeping through the grass. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated to help with winter and weeds. Thanks.
Comments (22)
3 years agoI'm guessing you did not get your sod from Milberger's Nursery (1604 and Bulverde Rd). They don't sell dead pieces of sod. The pull them off and trash them. So when you replace those pieces, get them from Milberger's. I just threw away my receipt, but I think they are $1.29 per piece. You have to be there in the morning to get sod. They sell about 7 pallets before noon every day, so it is always fresh grass.
I see nutgrass/nutsedge in your pictures. That means you're watering too much. Nutgrass loves swampy conditions, so it's a great clue that you're over watering. Once you back off on the watering that stuff will go away without spraying. If you absolutely feel the need to spray it, you have to use a sedge killer, not a normal herbicide.
By now you should be skipping multiple days between watering. My sod went down Oct 8 and I'm now watering every 3-4 days hoping to stretch that to every 5 days very soon.
St Augustine is very likely to go dormant in the winter. It might look dead, but you already have an example or real dead grass. It won't look like that.
The gray colored grass in your side picture is dying from a fungal disease. Again, too much water. WAAAAY too much water. I always recommend using ordinary corn meal to treat that. Tell me what side of town you're on and I can direct you to a place to a feed store for corn meal in 50-pound bags. Application rate is 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. I would suggest doing the entire lawn for 2 reasons. One is you probably have the disease elsewhere, and two is that the corn meal will turn the grass deeper green, so doing the entire lawn avoids spotty looking grass. The corn meal takes 3 full weeks to show results, so don't get impatient and spray it with a chemical fungicide.
By next April you're going to notice the weeds your neighbor has will have spread into your St Aug on the side. The herbicide that works for me is this one, available at Walmart or most anywhere else (during the season).
That stuff does not work against nutgrass or bermuda, but the bermuda will go away by itself as the St Augustine takes over. Always mow the lawn at the mower's highest setting and the bermuda doesn't stand a chance.
The light green/brown color in the front is another sign of overwatering.
Since you are new to lawn care, here are the basics (tuned up for your lawn in your area)
1. FOR MATURE TURF Water deeply and infrequently. In Bandera I use an oscillator sprinkler and water for 4-6 hours every 10 days. If we get a lot of rain, I will not water again until the grass starts to look dry. We're supposed to get an inch of rain this week, so I don't plan to water again - maybe not for the rest of the year. The new grass will be on a weaning program of watering, but I still will watch it after the rain. Generally deep watering means 1 inch all at one time. Generally infrequently means once per week during the hottest heat of summer (again, I do it every 10 days). During cooler weather I back off week by week until when temps are routinely lower than 70 degrees I water once a month.
2. Mulch mow at the mower's highest setting all the time. You can weld it in place.
3. Fertilize with organic or chemical fertilizer on Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving. Easy to remember. Don't get tempted to fertilize early just because all the marketing tells you to. I always use organic fertilizer at 15 to 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. My favorite is alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow). And don't feel bad if your lawn is not the first to awaken in the spring. Every yard is different.
4. Spray weeds in mid April and late September.
Never use weed n feed products. Those are one of those too good to be true products. Some people get them to work, but I would never suggest them for a beginner.
Don't get excited about dethatching, aeration, or anything fancy. St Augustine doesn't need it. If someone convinces you that you need it, please come back here so I can talk you out of it and give you an alternative. St Augustine is a really low hassle lawn.
Side tip: your little tree out front is buried in mulch. If you're going to have a ring of mulch around it, you should pull the mulch away from the bark so it can breathe. You should dig down until you hit the roots flaring out. That's low enough. It will look like a crater.
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St Augustine grass problems
Comments (2)I have three live oak trees in the front on my north side and have no trouble getting grass to grow. It might not be the thickest stand of St Aug, but it doesn't die out every winter. Sand is my favorite St Aug substrate, so no problems with that. What is your watering regimen? How often do you water and for how long each time. My guess, based on years of reading posts from Floridians with St Aug problems, is that you water far too frequently, but I'd like your confirmation before I launch off into corrective action. I further suspect that your lawn dies out from a fungal disease exacerbated by the watering regimen. How high/low do you mow? Again, my guess is that you mow too low. If you are not using organic fertilizer, you should start. The main reason sand works for me is that I've been using organics for 12 years. By organics I mean something like corn meal, alfalfa pellets, soybean meal, or other readily available ground up animal feed that you can find at your local feed store. The application rate for these organics is 15 to 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. You can apply them any day of the year, or every day of the year, without fear of harming the grass. What these feed types of fertilizers do is develop a healthy family of microbes in your soil. Then the microbes will feed the actual plants and grass growing there....See MorePalmetto St. Augustine -- San Antonio
Comments (4)I had to do a one word answer because the other hand was holding the phone and my daughter talks forever ... LOL. Anyway, we got our Floratam at Milbergers. They have a big turnover so their grass is always fresh and healthy in my experience....See MoreProblem area in my St Augustine, not sure what the cause is
Comments (14)I was sort of hoping you'd be living in Blythe or somewhere where you needed extra water, but no. You will almost never need to water more than once every 2 weeks. On the days when the Santa Ana winds blow, if that lasts longer than 2 days, you might want to water once before your 2 weeks are up. But you do need to water a full inch when you water. If runoff is an issue for you, we have a cure for that, but I'll wait for you to ask. Or if your soil is unduly hard - same solution. Ask your lawn mower guy to raise the deck all the way to the top for you. Still mow every other week. If he refuses, remind him there are other lawn care professionals who will do it. St Augustine really performs a lot (LOT) better when mowed high. It does not grow any faster when mowed high. In fact there are no minuses to mowing taller. You don't have to go to my mowing extreme, but here's a picture of my chow chow walking through the tall St Augustine at my old house...All you can see is the top of her tail and ears, thus demonstrating that St Augustine does just fine all the way up to 32 inches high. That grass had no fertilizer in years. One part in the shade (but still with droughts and 100+ summer temps) needed no irrigation at all for 36 months. If you mow your grass at 3.5 to 4 inches you'll get much better rooting and the ability to withstand prolonged dry spells. That does look like the same fungal disease I get. I get it because sometimes I don't get the tree leaves off the grass before the dew hits it. In your area you have dew 365 days a year, so you absolutely cannot leave anything on the grass. My wife used to leave garden trash on the grass until I 'splained it to her that just leaving it there overnight started the disease process. I'm not sure which disease it is but for me (being organic) the solution is always the same product - corn meal. Corn meal starts a biological chain reaction that eventually (a week or two) kills the disease. Then in 3 weeks you should see the grass returning, by stolons, back to the bare spot. You can try using a chemical fungicide if you prefer. I can't recommend one, because I never use them. The corn meal rate is 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Do the entire lawn because you don't know where it starts or stops. And if you only do the bad spots, you'll have deep green grass in those spots because corn meal is an organic fertilizer. Pick one or the other to try. If you try the chemical and you're not happy with it, you can't use corn meal later, because that biological chain reaction requires healthy soil microbes and the fungicide kills the required beneficial fungi....See MoreSt Augustine Help in San Antonio
Comments (2)I have St. Aug in the front yard of a 60s era home as well, under heavy oak canopy. It grows reasonably well, though in the corners of the yard that get a lot more sun, the Bermuda is taking over. No biggie. I just put down some long-release lawn fertilizer in the spring, and that seems to do the trick for where it thrives. St. Aug is a vining grass, so if the soil is decent, you can do transplants in the spring, when the runners in front are getting long, and hanging where they shouldn't be. Just cut them off and transplant. There are good sets of instructions for doing that online. Sort of a do-it-yourself lawn replacement....See More- 3 years ago
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Hi dchall, was going to reach out to you here soon. I’m really concerned about my lawn. Here are some pictures and hopefully you can point me into a right direction to make my lawn healthy.
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