Can you Dethatch or Power Rake when it's hot outside?

[Music] now if you guys been following my channel for a while i have been an advocate for dethatching or removing lawn debris off of the surface of the soil for a very long time now a lot of you guys are getting to that point where you want to slay that lawn which i'm really excited about and getting a lot of messages and the primary question is can you use a d thatcher or a power rake in the peak of the summer at its hottest so let's talk about these d thatchers in essence the d thatchers remove surface debris off of the top of the soil now we have this part which we call the crown which is the very top end of the thatch layer that oftentimes gets a little out of control now dethatchers and power rakers they do affect the crown ever so slightly when it comes to thatch but the primary purpose is to remove debris so ginger where does all this surface debris come from well this surface debris is just dead grass now this dead grass comes from a couple different sources the primary culprit that i find is actually your lawnmower keep in mind we're mowing one to two times a week depending on the situation and it's physically impossible and improbable that your mower is going to catch all the clippings now second of all a lot of you guys are mulching improperly the chunks are left behind too big anywhere between a quarter of an inch on up to one inch that you're just leaving on top and in many areas like mine where we're at altitude of almost a mile high it's just not going to break down now the other thing is the end of the season short mow many of us out there are not getting the top of the grass low enough down to about an inch or an inch and a half and over winter when that grass goes to hibernate we get a lot of dead head and over time it gets pressed into the soil and doesn't come back up in the springtime because we're not mowing short enough to remove the debris the other issue that i encounter i encounter quite often is a lot of you guys are watering too much then too little than too much then too little and you repeat this cycle so you end up having drought stress damage where the leaf blades get damaged to the point where they're brown and it never gets cleaned up now the surface debris often more often than not does not get cleaned out on top of the soil it gets stuck now for me this lawn is a pretty classic case scenario of debris matter now it's clouding the color you can see right in there that they're watering pretty okay but you'd be surprised how much debris that i can actually get out of this lawn it's almost shocking and when you get on top of it you can see all that gray matter that's choking it out but let's grab the thatch rake real quick so i can kind of show you what's happening now what i want to show you is this area is literally 14 inches by 14 inches we're not dealing with a lot of surface area that i pulled out and i just like to show people that i put the grass back on top to kind of give you a better feeling of what this looks like just in this area where i pulled it out and it ends up being this big giant matted sponge now we have a few problems here the materials like water fertilizer nutrients going down they get stuck in this material of just now the other issue that we have is when you're watering the evaporation coming up also gets stuck in this matter and the water going down gets stuck in this matter so you have this perfect area for fungus now what a lot of people don't talk about is this is where brown patch melting out disease summer patch you know and pythium blight you'll find that in this matter so if you're commonly getting brown patch lithium and blight you may want to look at removing this now this is almost shocking how much debris is in just this little tiny area that's like 14 inches by 14 inches now the one thing i like to call attention to is this matter is commonly hotter than the rest of the lawn it holds the light more and then i find that the temperature when i use my meat thermometer is typically about three to five degrees warmer in these areas now it's a hundred degrees out here right now ground temperature sitting around 75 degrees on average an extra three degrees even 78 80 degrees that's a big deal for kentucky bluegrass let alone the air transfer the nutrient transfer and just letting the grass be grass but when it gets stuck in all this stuff it can't do what it's supposed to there is something very satisfying getting rid of surface debris it increases the color makes you feel good just seeing all that crap coming out but i'll tell you what using the thatcher egg it is not a fun job whatsoever a lot of you guys have purchased the sun joe dethatchers and the greenworks dethatchers my suggestion is you could actually use those weekly they are very non-invasive now i don't recommend using a power rake weekly beats up the long real real well and the recovery time is up to six to eight weeks which is why i don't recommend it where the dethatchers you can actually use them daily weekly monthly i didn't believe it but the head guys at alex told me that that's what they're doing to their soccer fields and the nfl pro football fields so i took the challenge and i decided to go with it on my own lawn so this season i've actually been averaging once a week to get that color nice and well last week i did it it was 92 degrees and today we are a whopping 98 degrees at the high and we're gonna get it done once again now one thing i really love about power raking or dethashing a lawn is that it increases color because you remove the dead debris that is clouding your color now let's say that you have a massive debris problem well we know that it's possible that you're going to end up with fungus we know that it's overheating the lawn so at the end of the day the question is should you remove the debris and the jinja's answer is always going to be yes remove the debris worst case scenario in the heat it's just going to make the recovery process a little bit longer but nothing that you can't handle by putting down a biostimulant like humates seek help and a little bit of fertilizer to force growth i call it my eight week better homes to garden for a reason now this process you get down to about three to four weeks if you use a dethatcher as opposed to a power rake which is much less invasive the dethatchers have almost looks like a paper clip cut in a u-shape as opposed to a power rake that has a flail those flails are a thick disc metal base and they score the ground and it makes a little bit harder on the lawn let's get back to this other lawn the look dingy and bad we know it's 96 degrees outside right now should you detach it the answer is absolutely yes the best comparison i can give you is if i give you a bowl of cereal put my arms around your throat started choking you and started spoon feeding you the cereal it's gonna make it a little bit difficult to eat removing this debris is definitely the right option if you choose not to remove it fertilizer has a rough time the water has a rough time getting down it has a rough time evaporating up and you end up with a fungal disease layer of dead matter so we did one pass one pass anybody that way to here and i am 100 full i mean this is just absolutely crazy you'd be shocked how much is coming out and none of it really is live material it's all just dead dead debris one pass hot or not we're gonna get this job done and we're gonna get this job done right don't let the fact that i'm using my owlet mower as the dethatcher today turn you off the sunjo and greenworks dethatchers work fantastic and i dare say they removed just about the same amount of debris the only difference is you're not catching it putting it into a bucket all right so that is about my third pass on the lawn just this little itty bitty section i filled the entire trash can this is so ridiculous and it's just dead debris um no substitution for it i wanted you guys to see it in real time it's still got a long ways to go i'm still gonna work it but overall the color's getting better just want to give you an idea of how much dead grass we pulled from this section which i'd estimate it's about a thousand square feet believe it or not that's the second trash can that is full i filled that one up across the street where i had the camera on it it's just amazing how much that is i mean if you think about that if we just spread that back out here on the lawn that's almost i would guesstimate about four inches thick across the board and acts like a giant sponge once we get this breathing once everything starts going we get all the water nutrients evaporation occurring the soil gets happy the microbes get stirring everything starts pushing and then you have a nice happy lawn happy soil happy lawn now of course they are going to tell you you can't dethatch when it's hot outside they will tell you have to leave the debris because it's good for the lawn they are not on the lawn doing the doing they don't have an amazing lawn and it is my interpretation that they are probably a bunch of old landscapers that got out there when it was really hot and said you know what it's too hot i don't want to do the hard work we're just going to tell them it's too hot and it'll stress the lawn out but guys if you guys have any questions or concerns hit me up in the comments love to help you out don't be they get on the lawn be the joneses slay that line till the next time guys pass the lawn digit i'm [Music] out [Music]

Channel: Pest and Lawn Ginja

Views: 182,507

Rating: 4.9276772 out of 5

Keywords: lawn care, thatch, dethatch, dethatching, power rake, power raking, backpack sprayer, dallisgrass, mulching a lawn, how to remove thatch, sun joe scarifier, sunjoe scarifier, sunjoe, greenworks dethatcher, greenworks dethatcher review, ugly lawn fix, how to dethatch a lawn, how to dethatch your lawn, how to power rake a lawn, how to power rake your grass, peat moss grass seed, spring fertilizer application, sun joe dethatcher

Id: AUUgWDXc7zc

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020