Uncategorized

So far you have likely read my overview of what you need to do to fix your lawn and I have been given you a deep dive on each part along the way. After my last post I said we would talk about other things you might add to top dress or improve the soil in your lawn and if you should place grass seed or not.

There are many great products you might add to your lawn but I will leave the advanced stuff for later and keep to the simple stuff people are asking the most about. The first is that people are asking what they should add to fix the bare spots in their lawn after killing off the weeds. It seems many first responses are to add grass seed and hope that fills in the bare spots. This is normally an unnecessary step if you have at least some Bermuda left. The Bermuda as things called stolons. I always called these runners before but they are great for filling your lawn back in. You see they will creep out and start new grass.

So instead of adding grass seed the best thing to do is spread some garden soil at about a half inch in depth and water the area regularly the next few weeks. I have attached a few pictures. In one you see my neighbors bare lawn after being treated for weeds. The second picture is the lawn with soil placed on it. This will help promote growth and his Bermuda will start filling it in. You might also notice the grass blades are a bit thicker. That’s because he has common Bermuda after a previous owner seeded his lawn. Most of our lawns had a hybrid Bermuda sod placed on our lawns. The hybrid has a thinner blade and doesn’t normally produce seeds. Most Bermuda grass seeds are going to be for common Bermuda. If you use grass seed this will cause the lawn to looked mismatched as both are growing. So that is one reason I encourage promoting growth through stolons as opposed to reseeding.

If your whole lawn is bare and no Bermuda is left, then that is when you would use seed, because having a common Bermuda lawn is better than just bare dirt. In that case make sure to NOT use the pre-emergent I recommend at other times. It stops both new weeds and new grass seeds from growing.

So if you have been following my posts I gave you an overview of what you needed to do to fix your lawn and I have been giving you a deep dive on each part along the way. Now that you have killed all the weeds in your lawn and mowed the lawn at the proper height you might now want to add things to promote growth.

Stop! The first thing we want to do is set up the defense against weeds in your lawn. This is more important than anything else you might add to the lawn and will prevent more work later. This is done with a pre-emergent herbicide. A pre-emergent herbicide normally comes in a granular form and is placed in your lawn using a spreader. What a pre-emergent does is stop seeds from germinating and suppresses new plant growth. So this stops weeds spreading via their seeds and halts new weed growth. The most common pre-emergent herbicide product is “Weed and Feed”. Weed and Feed products combine a pre-emergent herbicide with a fertilizer. This will simultaneously prevent weed growth and feed your laws. So the plus side of weed and feed is the convenience and the down side is the fertilizer that you might not want to put down at certain times of the year. Such as winter when the lawn is dormant or summer (above 85) when it can burn the grass if it isn’t watered in well. For myself I prefer a dedicated pre-emergent product like Scotts HALTS. I place that down every other month to best control weeds and I have no worries about feeding my lawn when I don’t want to. The down side of that is needing to buy a separate fertilizer product for the times of the year I want to do that but that is the trade off I make. Either way you want to spread pre-emergent at least four times a year. Also as an FYI don’t spread a pre-emergent on freshly seeded grass or somewhere where you want to place grass seed in the near future as a pre-emergent will stop all seed growth.

Some important notes when spreading any granular on your lawn is first don’t spread it right before you mow. The mower will either pick it up and spread it in more concentrated paths or pick it up in your bag, if your bagging the clippings. Either way you don’t want that, so spread it after you mow or several days in advance so it has a chance to settle into the lawn. Once it is spread the granular is just going to sit there and do nothing until it gets water on it. So if rain isn’t in the forecast you will need to water it to get it helping your lawn and that is my second important note about using granular products on your lawn.

So far we have covered just chemicals you might want to put into your lawn here. I think in the next post I will talk about other things you might add to top dress or improve the soil in your lawn and if you should place grass seed or not. Spoiler warning: in most cases spreading grass seed isn’t the best idea.

So people on my street might have seen me spraying a few things on my lawn yesterday. In my side yard the grass is a bit weak and had some weeds so I sprayed Spectracide Weed Stop on it and in my back yard where I haven’t treated yet. This helped me win in my front yard that is now virtually weed free. It only cost $5 at Lowes and gets the job done. Some of you really need to use it. Yes it will kill the half of your lawn that is weeds but Bermuda is tough and will come back. If you have St. Augustine use the stuff that’s marked for that.

The product everyone should use is some sort of insecticide. Mosquitoes and several other bugs can have a pretty short range so if everyone sprayed for them, we would put a huge dent in their population around here. I sprayed the Triazicide product yesterday and while walking in my yard this dusk/evening I had zero bugs flying around.

I just thought I would share here a couple of the things that have helped me get my yard in shape.