De-thatching your lawn by hand, and 3 great uses for the grass clippings you remove

hey guys welcome back another hillside gardener episode and today kind of continuing the theme I was kind of talking about in the previous episode about getting back to doing stuff by hand yard worked by hand getting away from all always having to rely on machinery things like that so this episode is going to be about dethatching your lawn what it is and how to do it so as you cut your grass over the years you're gonna build up grass clippings on the lawn which will actually act as a barrier which is gonna prevent rain from soaking in and also will prevent fertilizer and things like that for really soaking into the soil and could actually choke out the beneficial grasses which gives a fertile opportunity for weeds and noxious plants such as Bermuda grass and things that you don't want growing in your lawn you've worked so hard to establish so there's two ways you can do this the first one is something everyone probably has on their own anyways just get a nice heavy-duty rake like this now I say you need a heavy-duty rake because you're going to need to actually put a little bit of force into what we're gonna do to actually pull the thatch or the dead plant material that's built up on the surface of your lawn it's gonna take something pretty heavy-duty so this is rake works well for that purpose if you only have this however what I prefer to use which is there is a tool that you can use by hand of course is called a dethatching rake okay so let me go ahead and show you that now this guy here is what we call the dethatching rake this is pretty heavy-duty sturdy material here so and looking at it a little more closely there are two sides to this rake if you can see the side here is perfectly straight okay there's no bend in it this is what I call more of the raking side if you turn it over you see this side they're all kind of angled to the side like this this is going to be more of the cutting side and don't worry guys I'm going to show you demonstrate this what I mean by this just kind of giving you a heads up ahead of time so this is the angled side to be used for more of a cutting or a vertical cut while this like I said again it's more the flatter side the straight straighter side so this is going to be the raking more the shallower flatter plain if you will and just I'm not gonna do this now but just so you know on the sides here you can loosen this up which will actually rotate so you more vertical or more horizontal cut onto the thatch of your law and depending on your own purposes their own personal style and or preferences okay so let's go ahead and pause here I want to show you close-up but what I mean by pulling fetch off of the lot alright guys so I've already kind of detached this that you can kind of see the soil and the stuffs been kind of disturbed but just if you're doing this at home you're just going to want to go through short deliberate kind of powerful movements here to actually start detaching the lawn now if the heavy-duty rake all you're gonna do is like I said you really want to put a little bit of force into this because you're really trying to break up the roots and all this thatch and all the weeds and things a baby growing in your lawn okay now this is effective everybody has a rake it doesn't have to be a super heavy-duty but you're gonna be more effective if you are able to get a really powerful kind of movement like that that's really gonna bust a dead plant material on the ground like I said I've already kind of done this and so as effective if starting from scratch however I do want to demonstrate with the dethatching rake just how effective that is at actually pulling and busting up weeds and things from the lawn alright so first things first when you get your detaching rake I always start with the angled side which we mentioned was the more the vertical slash cutting side that's what I call it my channel I'll make it up as I go along but uh there's probably a real word you're supposed to use I'm not sure City how you closing here and with the angled side you want to make sure that this right here needs to be level on the ground okay when the angled side here is actually gonna make it let's actually gonna cut cut and or rip through the fetch in the weed and plant material okay so you want to cook like the same with the with the actual heavy-duty rake you're gonna do short deliberate motions you don't want to go you know this digging in super hard you don't want to keep it it's too vertical because you really can slice into the yard hurting the plants and actually killing the grass you're trying to save okay so like I said you're gonna go to the back and forth motion shorter is better you don't need to rip and actually pull so hard on this then it's actually going to rip beneficial things from the law okay so let's go ahead and demonstrate this now all right guy to see that right there you can kind of hear as I was doing that it was cutting through these roots and these rhizomes this is some invasive like Bermuda grass tougher here you don't want this I don't want in the art yet how effective that is expending and pulling out this for me to these weeds and things like that so now going over the exact same spot that I was just on we're switching over to the raking side the same area this is not really a biggie motion like this is not gonna be most of the like I said this is the same kind material but you're actually pulling all this off and don't worry if you pull a little bit of soil off with this it's gonna be just fine okay guys don't be too worried about that so anyways now why do you defend okay like I mentioned it's gonna help aerate the soil it's gonna actually scratch the surface of the soil help moisture and air get into the root zone of the beneficial and the grass you're actually wanting to grow in your lawn so it's kind of tips on when you want to do it you want to do this early in the spring Oh while the grass is just beginning to really actively grow you don't want to do this on a hot sunny day this is gonna stress you out for one because it's gonna be hot you wants to be out in the Sun all day be fetch in their yard trust me it's not what you want to do you'll get tired and overheated pretty quickly it's pretty uh pretty involved you know I said let's take a little bit of effort you got to do a little bit of manual labor on this that's what it's all about like I said getting back to using hand tools and doing stuff in the yard get some Sun on on your back and a little bit of a sweat and everything built up it's good for you it's good exercise and it's like I said I'm crazy I guess I just like doing yard work by hand anyways but anyways like I said it's gonna pull a lot of the weeds out it's gonna dig up things like clover any kind of buy any kind of creeping Charlie stuff like that that maybe sneak it into your lawn there it's gonna be very effective oh cool out at this time as you can kind of look at the so here if we kind of look down closely like the places like this where you know you might be disappointed you might realize that your yard must have been a lot of weeds you might pull out a bunch of old crabgrass or something you know it's gonna look a little bit shabby right now the neighbors might look at you like you're kind of like what are you doing to your lawn you're destroying it that's not true okay this right here is gonna grow back just fine and that being said and this is a perfect time right now to go and oversee your lawn get some good grass seed into the exposed areas which will actually help them establish better you know if you've ever tried to over seed your lawn and a heavily fetched lawn the grass seeds not even gonna make it to the soil so I can make contact with the soil because there could have been an inch or quarter-inch or I don't know how long you've been since you deep that tree long if if ever you know especially for using a very inefficient mower that's leaving big particles and things like that building up the grass seed may never you touch the soil that might be a reason why you've tried to over seed your lawn in the past and it didn't grow so this is a perfect time like I mentioned to put down some organic my prefer my preference lawn fertilizer or grass seed early in the spring help her get it established you know get it get it off to the best start you possibly can okay so let me go ahead and show you what I've pulled off in the lawn so far this morning this is like I said this is only about a 25 by 20 mil tiny front yard patch that I've just worked on so the entire backyard to do before I get up to the next thing don't be in a hurry with this you know the use of short deliberate motions do this take your time and go over it a couple times different directions as much as you possible can you do this once a year you know don't be in a hurry and there are some dogs bark with a pet ground so you know what are you gonna do about that let me show you what I got over here so all right so look at this guy's this is off like I said just a small little patch in my front yard look how much of this stuff I pull it off this grass clippings there's some weeds there's a lot of like clover clover vines here's some other stuff like this stuff right here is this nasty it grows everywhere around here this stuff is a runner it forms over this soil and chokes out your grass this is a great way to get all this junk off of your lawn okay now like I said your lawns gonna look a little shabby for a week or two stuff kind of establishes and gets back going that's alright so while I got you here and you have all this nice material right now please don't do this don't bag it up and sit it out for somebody else to take let me show you three things three things that I'm gonna do that I can show you just in my yard just here of how I'm gonna use this valuable resource as opposed to throwing it away and uh you know wasting all my time and effort so let me go ahead and show you number one alright so number one this is where I do my Burma composting I made a video a long time ago this is an old repurposed sandbox that was left over from the previous tenants our land homeowners whatever but underneath all this beautiful love you can see some eggshells oh my nice bourbon compost it's coming around close here you see down here this is all my nice beautiful Burma compost tons of worms organic matter breaking down I'm just gonna throw some of these old uh you know clippings I got her here right on top which is gonna help insulate this the worms are gonna love it it's gonna break down so yeah don't throw it away find it way to compost it give it to your worms okay it's gonna be awesome they're gonna love it alright so number two this is uh not my finished compost pile of course but what leaves pine needles things I've gotten this time of year early in the spring the availability of green material for your compost is rather limited so using this defect lonna waste into the audre already started compost pile this is mostly like I said leaves and pine needles etc etc adding the green material into this I'll go ahead and mix this all up of course it's actually gonna be getting that more of that green brown material balance which is actually gonna get this compost started breaking down and like I said this is not gonna be used anytime soon just gonna take the entire summer it's gonna break it down probably add it into the fall so like I said don't be in a hurry take your time but don't waste this really awesome resource okay use it for your making your compost for an early spring source of green materials alright guys so number three what I'm doing with this and this is what I'm going to use some of these clippings for is actually healing up or around my potatoes so because Oommen down here you can say we had a late season frost so these potatoes were not protected I probably should have done a better job covering these up but it kind of came out of nowhere this 28 degree night they had predicted 36 got down to 28 so it wasn't expecting a frost we got it but these plants should be covered however it is very important to actually Hill up or keep mulching potatoes as they grow in order to protect the tubers and allow the potatoes to grow more effectively so like I said just using these oh that's clippings like this I'll go ahead and mulch this up around my potatoes really nice and thick and it be fine so do you have to use these right away no these are just three options I have you could actually let these dry out if you feel you know you would like to use more as dried clippings or a dried mulch in the flowerbeds garden or elsewhere all right so guys so this is a Dave your hillside gardener here gonna go ahead and sign off showing you how to detach your lawn and give me a three awesome tips on how to repurpose the hard work you put in using these grass clippings and that's dethatching material in your yard so I hope you guys liked it if you did please subscribe give us a thumbs up in some nice comments and we'll see you next time here on the hillside

Channel: Dave The Hillside Gardener

Views: 123,763

Keywords: dethatching, dethatch your lawn, lawn tools, how to lawn care, dethatch in spring, spring lawn care, how to dethatch, benefits of dethatching, organic, hillside, lawn tips, using lawn clippings in garden, compost, vermicompost

Id: RR4Exyhc1L4

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2020