DETHATCH, OVERSEED and FERTILIZE for the BEST LAWN

[Music] the cool temperatures of fall are finally here which means it's the perfect opportunity for you to overhaul your lawn today we're going to talk about dethatching and over seeding to figure out if it's something you should do in your own lawn whether you need to do it or not and if so how to take the steps to get it done so how do you determine whether you should defat your lawn or not well first of all thatch is a buildup of dead grass and organic material that sits on top of your soil near the crown of your grass plant and if you take a look you pull apart your grass a little bit and you see a layer of about a quarter inch to a half inch of dead material that looks brown that's a sign that you should be dethatching your lawn because if you don't that stuff stays there it's going to deprive your grass of air water and nutrients and it's going to keep them from making their way down into the root zone where your grass plant can use it when you're dethatching your lawn there's a few different tools you can use to get the job done a simple rake with metal tines like this is an effective way to remove thatch as you can see when i pull back on this this brown material that dead grass is going to start coming up and this is what our thatch layer is that's what we're trying to remove so this can be pretty time consuming but if you have a small area you can use simply just a rake like this pull all that stuff back and already you can see the pile that's been created if using a rake is just going to be too much work this is a really great option this is the greenworks electric dethatcher i've had this for four years i use it usually about once a year i've given it out to friends to use it's held up really well so this is basically the same concept as going through with the rake so this has got metal tines in the bottom the electric motor spins it digs down through to that thatch layer and it lifts it all up and drops it on top of the grass which clears it all out so this greenworks dethatcher has got three different settings it's got high if you pull out on this twist that whatever is on the bottom is what the setting is so right now it's at medium and then low and it's got this on each of the wheels if you've never done this before i recommend starting off on the high setting go through with that if it's not really pulling out much you can move it to the medium but don't start out with it too low because you don't want to dig down too deep into your turf even though your grass looks healthy and green it's pretty amazing to see how much thatch comes out when you use a dethatching machine like this so i'm going to get this thing going let's see how much we can get out of my lawn today [Music] [Music] all right just did a few passes as you can see right behind me it's amazing how much stuff gets pulled up when you use this dethatcher everything looked nice and green before but going through with this you're pulling up all that dead material and then when i over seed in just a little bit it's gonna have so much more space to get down into that dirt and germinate and turn into that good grass that i want so i'm gonna keep it going see how much of this stuff we can get [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right all done with the dethatching in the front yard in the backyard got everything all cleaned up using the leaf blower and my rotary mower sucked up all that debris and everything's looking good now so the next step that we're gonna go with is over seeding and i'm going with perennial rye grass you can choose whatever is best for your situation but for me i love the look of perennial rye grass and i'm gonna put that down a rate of about three pounds per thousand square feet in my broadcast spreader my scots mini guard broadcast spreader and i'm gonna put that at setting number three [Music] all right the dethatching's done the seed is on the ground next what i want to do is put down some fertilizer something that's going to enrich the soil and also help that new grass build up a solid root zone going into the cold months of the winter time and what i'm going with is called chicken poop it's an aerobically composted chicken manure that you can pick up at menards this is sold at every menard store i got this i think it's like 9.99 a bag so i picked this up earlier on the year i used it as a sample area because i'm not just going to put anything on my lawn and i had some great results in the side yard that i'll show you but this is going down along with my seed it's going to help enrich the soil and help build up that new grass that i'm putting down so for this i'm going to go at the light rate so about 10 pounds per thousand square feet is what's recommended when you're over seating like i am today one thing about this is it doesn't have that pungent smell like a malorganite or an other organic fertilizer might this stuff really doesn't smell too bad [Music] all right the hard work is done so now all i have to do is give this a deep watering that's what's recommended of the bag of chicken poo that's also going to keep that grass seed wet and get everything jump started and looking beautiful so thanks so much for watching this video if you have any questions let me know good luck this fall and i'll see you next time

Channel: Lakehouse Lawn Care

Views: 19,779

Rating: 4.9406528 out of 5

Keywords: dethatch, overseed, overseeding, dethatching, over-seed

Id: zBh_ZrfqbZE

Length: 6min 48sec (408 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021