It’s been a busy month of August. Between work and taking care of my 4 year old daughter all month, I’ve had no time to write any articles. With that being said, it’s time for a late Summer lawn update.
We’ve had plenty of hot summer days and rain wasn’t consistent. We either got a lot of it, or stretches of no rain. This is the first summer that I didn’t have to deal with rust fungus. I attribute this to a well timed fungicide application, however, having an irrigation system I believe helped a lot too. Additionally, having overseeded my lawn last year with Black Beauty grass seed introduced new varieties of grass into my lawn which also helped.
Late Summer Lawn Watering
Over the last month I didn’t put down anything on my lawn. Something I learned was that the “water deep and infrequent” method doesn’t seem to apply to my lawn. I was watering about 0.5″, 3 times per week but my lawn didn’t respond well to it. It always looked stressed. My type of soil doesn’t hold on to water for long. Watering too much results in run off. If I waited a day between waterings, it got very dry. Therefore I decreased the amount of water per cycle and set my system to water everyday. This helped perk things up a bit. I will continue to follow this schedule next year to see if I get my lawn to look better during the Summer months.
Preparing To Overseed My Lawn
I’m currently preparing to overseed next week. What I’ve done so far was put down 2 spot applications (10 days apart) of Tenacity to kill any weeds that came up since the Spring. As you’ll see from the slide show below, it does a pretty good job at killing anything that isn’t good grass. At first it doesn’t appear to do much but after 7-10 days you’ll notice weeds begin to turn white, before they die off.
My next step will be to cut my lawn about 2 notches shorter than I normally do, bringing it down to 2 inches. This will stunt my existing grass a little bit due to cutting off more than 1/3 of the grass blade at once. I want this to happen so when I overseed, the new seedlings will have some time to catch up to the existing grass. Before I put seed down, I’m going to use the Greenworks Dethatcher to dethatch my lawn. This will remove dead material and make it easier for seed, water and nutrients to get down to the soil. You should dethatch your lawn once a year, either in the Spring or Fall when the grass is actively growing.
I’m planning to make another post with pictures on my overseeding process. Until then, I hope you enjoy what’s left of the summer.
