Fall is fast approaching and with it comes an opportunity to restore your lawn after the heat of summer. The Blue Crew at Royal Creations Architectural Landscaping recommend the following steps to restore your lawn.
Weed Control
When your grass is struggling and thinning out, weeds take the opportunity to grow and spread. If you are planning to overseed your grass, you cannot put a pre-emergent on your lawn because it will keep your seeds from growing. We recommend spot spraying a post-emergent spray to kill clumps of weeds. If there are just a few weeds, it is easier to just pull them up. In either case, they need to be removed before you overseed your lawn, or they will crowd the new grass out.
Mark Sprinkler Heads To Avoid Damaging Them
Flag And Adjust Sprinklers
Before going any further in your lawn restoration, it is important to mark where your sprinkler heads are so you do not rip them out when dethatching or aerating your lawn. You can buy small flags on thin wires from big box stores and nurseries and use them to mark each head. Marking them gives you a chance to repair any sprinkler heads that are damaged or don’t work properly. In addition, it is important to adjust your sprinkler to water the new seeds you are planting. If you fail to do this, your new grass will have a hard time establishing itself.
Dethatch
Thatch is a layer of dead grass, roots, and debris that builds up between the grass and the soil surface. It can form an almost impenetrable layer that keeps water, nutrients, and air from reaching the roots. Any time thatch is one inch thick or deeper, you need to remove it. Before you overseed, dethatch so your seeds can reach the soil surface and grow.
For a small yard, you can use a dethatching rake to rip out the dead grass and roots. If you have a large yard, you will want to rent a dethatching machine. Dethatching rakes work great, but they are tiring to use. After dethatching your lawn, rake the debris up and compost it or throw it away. Water your lawn until the soil is saturated with water before you move to the next step.
Aerate
Plants absorb water, nutrients, and air from the soil around them. When the soil gets compacted, these things have a hard time penetrating the surface. To fix that, you want to rent a core aerator and run it across the lawn. Watering the lawn before aerating helps the aerator get as deep as it needs to in the soil. Aerators punch holes in the soil and leave the soil they remove on your lawn in plugs. After you aerate, rake these plugs until they fall into the grass. They will dissolve the next time you water.
Overseed
The easiest way to overseed a lawn is to use a push spreader. Set the dispersal rate according to the grass seed package instructions. Walk back and forth in one direction, such as north to south, then walk back and forth in the other way, such as east to west. This provides plenty of seed everywhere in the lawn. Missing a spot leaves a thin area that does not look good.
Top Dress With Peat Moss or Compost
After you seed the lawn, spread about an inch of peat moss or compost on your lawn. Rake it in so the amendments touch the ground. This will provide the seeds with a burst of nitrogen that is slow enough releasing to avoid burning the seedlings.
Fertilize
Now is a good time to fertilize your lawn, too. Pick a fall fertilizer and spread it according to the label instructions. Cover the lawn in one direction, then in the perpendicular direction to get good coverage.
New Grass Needs More Water
Water
After you sow your seeds, top dress them, and fertilize the lawn, water the yard well. This dissolves the plugs from aerating the soil, tells the seeds to germinate, and moves the nutrients from the top dressing and fertilizing into the root zone so the grass can use them. Make sure you don’t let any water run off into the storm drain. That wastes your expensive seed, top dressing, and fertilizer and pollutes streams and rivers.
Care Guide
If this sounds like a lot of work that is because it is a lot of work. Royal Creations Architectural Landscaping can do your fall lawn restoration for you. Simply subscribe to our lawn care program and enjoy your yard. We will even leave a detailed care guide for you to follow to maximize success. Call (816) 825-2524 for the details and to sign up.
After all the great rain we have gotten this spring, everything is growing in leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, that includes the weeds. If your pre-emergent control is failing, here are the ways Royal Creations Architectural Landscaping deals with weeds.
Thriving Turf
The best defense against weeds is to maintain a thriving lawn. Most turfgrasses will crowd out weeds when they are healthy.
Pick an appropriate turf grass and plant the recommended variety. The Kansas City area is in the transition area from warm season turfgrass like Bermuda and Buffalograss to cool season turfgrasses like Kentucky bluegrasses, perennial ryegrasses, tall fescues, and fine-leaf fescues. Most lawns will be cool season turf and we typically use tall fescue for residential lawns unless there is deep shade where we may use bluegrass as an alternative.
Maintain the soil pH between 6-7
Mow, water, and fertilize properly
Control insect and disease damage
Control thatch
Aerate compacted soils
Mechanical Control
Set your lawn mower at the correct height for the species of grass you have. Frequent weekly mowing will control many types of weeds because they never get tall enough to seed. We recommend 3 ½” to 4” height on fescue lawns. If you have a few weeds in your grass, you can pull them by hand. It is harder to eradicate weeds with deep root systems by weeding by hand.
Herbicides
Sometimes the weeds are so bad you must use an herbicide to kill them. Care should be taken when choosing a herbicide to make sure it will not only kill the weeds involved but won’t damage the turf grass you want. For this, we use a selective herbicide. If the lawn is badly infested with weeds, a broad herbicide that kills everything may be your only choice. After the weeds are dead, you can de-thatch and reseed the lawn to start over. Sometimes, this is necessary in areas where insects or disease has killed an area of your lawn and the weeds have taken over.
Landscape Beds
This time of year we are re-visiting our garden care clients at least once a month to help manage the weeds in their mulch and rock beds. We will spray in areas where the weeds are heavy and there are not a lot of ornamental plants. If it is planted more densely and the weeds are here and there we will pull them by and as often as possible.
Help Is On The Way
Royal Creations Architectural Landscaping is developing a comprehensive lawn care program to care for your turfgrass, eliminate weeds, treat disease and insect pests, and establish a thick, lush lawn. Call our office at (816) 825-2524 to get on the lawn care subscription list, and we will contact you with the details soon.
Since the spring has been so wet, you may not have evaluated your lawn for winter damage. Now is a good time to check how your lawn is doing and set it up for success as we transition to summer.
Assessment
The first step to working on your lawn is to assess it. See if you have areas with thin or bare grass, patches of dead grass, or signs of disease or pest damage. You can use aerial images like Google Earth to make notes of your property to scale.
Clean-up
Pick up any debris on the lawn, such as branches, leaves, or dead grass. You may have to pick up after some of these strong spring storms, too. Raking your lawn with a leaf rake can help loosen matted grass so the air can circulate around it. This will help prevent fungus from growing. You can also use a verticutter if you have a lot of thatch to help loosen it up and rake out the dead areas to allow new areas to grow.
Overseeding
If you noted thin or dead patches of grass during your lawn assessment, you can overseed those places now. Do not try to seed any area where pre-emergent or “weed and feed” products have been applied in the last six months, as the herbicide will kill the germinating grass seeds.
Use a quality grass seed mix that matches the grass growing in your lawn now. It is a good idea to find one with some rye in it because that will grow quickly but will die off in a few months, letting the remaining grass take over. We often mix our seed with some compost in a wheelbarrow before spreading it. Doing this ensures good soil-to-seed contact. You will have to water your overseeded area daily until the grass grows as tall as the other parts of the lawn. If the seeds dry out once they start germinating, they will not grow.
Shady Turf Areas
Growing grass in shady areas can be a real challenge. We recommend not putting pre-emergent in these areas so you can reseed several times. Most weeds don’t grow well in the shade, so pre-emergent there isn’t very helpful. Seeding throughout the growing season will give you a better chance of establishing grass and keeping the lawn in the shade.
Fertilization
Most lawns in our area are cool season grass, such as fescue or bluegrass. For these types we typically fertilize more in fall and early spring and less in the summer when they tend to struggle. The key to keeping cool season grass looking good throughout the summer is watering regularly and not over stressing with too much fertilizer in the heat of the summer.
Watering
The new grass needs to be watered every day to germinate and grow. Established grass needs to be watered two to four times a week, depending on rainfall and how hot it is. Overwatering for long run times especially in the evenin can make your grass susceptible to root rot. We recommend more frequent watering for shorter run times to keep the lawn looking its best.
Mowing
Wait to mow the new grass until the blades are about three to four inches tall. Set the mower at three inches high to let the grass grow well and fill in the spaces. This makes it hard for weeds to grow because they cannot out compete the grass.
Weed Control
While the new grass is growing in, hand pull or spot treat any weeds that grow. Treating the whole lawn is probably not needed unless it is in very bad shape. As mentioned above, do not spread pre-emergent on turf grass growing in deep shade. Pre-emergents in the early spring and spot-spraying liquid weed control later in the season work best. Don’t apply pre-emergent in areas that you may need to seed.
Maintenance
Monitor your lawn at least weekly to check for signs of stress, disease, or pest problems. The sooner you see problems, the better because treatments are more effective when the problems are small. As summer approaches, fungus and grubs are the next thing to watch out for. Nutgrass is another weed you may see from all the spring rains. These can all be treated with the right applications.
Stay Tuned For More Lawn Services
We are adding services to manage your lawn this year. Stay tuned for more details. In the meantime, get $25 off irrigation activation until June 1. Call the office at (816) 825-2524 to schedule your activation today.
