Need lawn advice
HU-971236316
last year
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dchall_san_antonio
last yearHU-971236316
last yearRelated Discussions
New to the countryside, need lawn advice
Comments (5)By all means, take advantage of the guys offer to regrade it. Assuming they know what they are doing, it will make a huge difference in your enjoyment of the yard. It takes years of practice to become good enough to do it "good enough." For an experienced tractor driver, it should take no more than 2 hours to do your back yard. Whether you need more soil or not will be up to them. More soil usually will change the drainage. Let them decide what to do. Actually you might get two other estimates for the job and talk to them about what they propose to do. You are bound to learn something. If you have full sun, the Kentucky bluegrass is the turf that will hold up to the kids best. It is a sod forming grass, meaning it spreads to fill in weak spots. Fescue is a bunch grass that might spread to fill in by the time of the next ice age. Ask your wife where she might like to have the garden before you do the lawn. She'll want the sunniest place. Here is the 1-2-3 of grass growing as found in these forums over the past decade. Water deeply and infrequently. Deeply means at least an hour in every zone, all at once. Infrequently means monthly during the cool months and no more than weekly during the hottest part of summer. If your grass looks dry before the month/week is up, water longer next time. Deep watering grows deep, drought resistant roots. Infrequent watering allows the top layer of soil to dry completely which kills off many shallow rooted weeds. Mulch mow at the highest setting on your mower. Most grasses are the most dense when mowed tall. Bermuda, centipede, and bent grasses are the most dense when mowed at the lowest setting on your mower. Dense grass shades out weeds and uses less water when tall. Dense grass feeds the deep roots you're developing in 1 above. By mulching you help return fertility to the soil. Fertilize regularly. I fertilize 4 times per year using organic fertilizer. Which fertilizer you use is much less important than numbers 1 and 2 above. GardenWeb does not host pictures. If you have pictures hosted somewhere else on the Internet, GW can link to them. An Internet photo hosting site might be tumblr, photobucket, picasa, or some others. Then you need to use the correct HTML code so it shows up here. Here is that code. <img src="YOUR PHOTO URL GOES HERE"> You get your photo URL by bringing up the photo (in your browser at the host's site) and right clicking on it. Select Copy Link Location. Then paste that location between the quotes in the code above. The quotes are necessary for this to work. Don't leave them out. The photo URL should look like this http://www.photobucket.com/yourphotos/photoname.jpg Putting it all together it will look something like this... <img src="http://www.photobucket.com/yourphotos/photoname.jpg"> Then post your message like normal....See MoreIn need of some expert advice. Lawn in need!
Comments (1)You can't know how much trouble you saved yourself by writing in here before doing anything else. Your worst problem is you have dallisgrass, not crabgrass. Crabgrass would die normally at the first frost, but not dallisgrass. It is a perennial and will take over quickly if you don't stop it. Since it is a grass, anything you use to kill it will also kill your bermuda. But since you have bermuda, it will grow back without doing anything else. Your second worst problem is the St Augustine weed. It, too, will take over under certain conditions. You don't have to do those, but unless you go the extra mile, a properly cared for bermuda lawn infested with St Aug will always look weedy. Possibly the easiest way to get rid of it is to make it sick. That's easy because all you have to do is cover it with some newspaper and wet it down every night. Leave the paper on for about a week and you should start to see lesions on the grass blades that look like the spots on this grass. Once you see that you can peel the paper off and let Nature take its course. The disease will spread throughout the St Aug and wipe it out. Since it does not come back from seed, once it's gone, it's gone. Bermuda might get the disease, but St Aug gets it fast and furious. It will die out in a month or so. If you get a freeze before it all dies out this year, the disease will come back next spring to get the rest of it. The bermuda will fill in as fast as the St Augustine dies out. Now the problem you don't know you have, and the problem that could easily become your biggest problem, is seeding into your existing bermuda. DO NOT DO THAT. Bermuda needs no seed. Once you have it, you practically have it for life. The problem with seeding into it is that the seed is very nearly a different species of plant from the grass you already have. What you have is a very good hybrid called Tif 419. What you get in seed is a variety of common bermuda seeds. The two plants do not mix well together. And I happen to have a picture of that, too. The fine bladed grass is Tif 419. The coarse bladed stuff running over top of the Tif is an invasion of common bermuda. As with St Augustine, once you have a mix of Tif with common, it always looks weedy. Find the Bermuda Bible online and memorize it. There are things you should be doing all the time. I can summarize: Every month: fertilize with a high nitrogen fertilizer Every week: water deeply 2x per week: mow But get the BB, it will explain when not to do those things. For your shady area you do want St Augustine. If you get a dwarf variety you can mow at the same height as the bermuda. If you cannot get a dwarf, then it is best to mow St Aug at the mower's highest setting (4 inches). St Aug is much less intensive to care for: Memorial Day: fertilize with a regular fertilizer (not weed-n-feed) Every week after the temps get high: water once, deeply, and mulch mow high Labor Day: fertilize with a regular fertilizer Thanksgiving: fertilize with a regular fertilizer By the way, centipede grass is out of the question in Dallas' alkaline soils....See MoreNeeding some lawn advice. (Grass type, aerating, overseeding)
Comments (3)Don't do anything else, including raking, until we figure some things out. Spraying the bermuda might have been a mistake. I realize you don't want bermuda, but it might be the most dominant grass for your area. It can be beautiful when properly cared for. Certainly it will overrun fescue every time. Where do you live? Dethatching is rarely necessary. Think of that "thatch" as organic fertilizer that you just took away from your lawn. I don't think that was thatch, but it's still not available to the lawn anymore. Some grasses can be killed out by dethatching, so we need to know what you have before you go any farther. Core aeration is unnecessary for seeding and very, VERY rarely necessary for any other reason. Whatever issue your lawn has that you think requires core aeration probably has a better solution. That grass with the dime looks far too dense to be fescue. And it looks coarse bladed to me. Can you dig down through the grass and tell whether you see runners across the surface? Really need to know where you live....See MoreNeed lawn care advice
Comments (1)Where do you live? I'm curious as to why your bermuda is still dormant. The stuff with the white flowers is poa annua. When bermuda is truly dormant you can spray the poa with Roundup. If the bermuda is starting to return, the Roundup will wipe it out. The other weed should come out easily with the True Green herbicide. Just because you have TG doing fertilizer and weed control, the most important part of the lawn (by far) is still your responsibility. Those would be watering and mowing. Even if you have a lawn mower every week you still have to water. Here's how. Watering: Deep and infrequent is the mantra for watering. This is for all turf grass all over the place. Deep means 1 inch all at one time. Put some cat food or tuna cans around the yard, and time how long it takes your sprinkler(s) to fill all the cans. Memorize that time. That will be the time you water from now on. My hose, sprinkler and water pressure takes 8 full hours to fill the cans. Your time will likely be less. I like gentle watering. As for watering frequency, that depends on the daytime air temperature. With temps in the 90s, deep water once per week. With temps in the 80s, deep water once every 2 weeks. With temps in the 70s, deep water once every 3 weeks. With temps below 70, deep water once a month. Note that you have to keep up with quickly changing temps in the spring and fall. This deep and infrequent schedule works in Phoenix and in Vermont, so it should work for you. The reason for deep and infrequent is to grow deeper, more drought resistant roots and to allow the soil to dry completely at the surface for several days before watering again. If it rains, reset your calendar to account for the rainfall....See Morerifis (zone 6b-7a NJ)
last yearHU-971236316
last yearbarb b
last yearlast modified: last yearlizzieswellness
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