DIY Dethatching & Overseed the Lawn | Sun Joe Dethatcher & Scarifier | Spring Lawn Care

[Applause] [Music] all right it's early spring and i want to get out here and start doing something on my lawn i've lived in this house for about a year and a half now and i really haven't done anything to it there's been so many other projects that i've been doing that i haven't really had the time to get out here and actually take care of the grass and a person who used to work at a golf course in the summers that's something that i really like i like having a nice fresh lush green lawn and i've been thinking about how i'm going to do this how i'm going to take it back and i want to do it in the easiest way possible something simple that's not taking up my you know a ton of time because there's so many other projects that i want to get done that i want a nice lawn uh but i don't want to spend a bunch of time i want to have my cake and eat it too so one way that i'm thinking about doing this is i'm going to start off by dethatching the alarm and instead of renting a tool or a machine from a larger machine from a rental place i'm going to use one of these dethatchers that you can buy on amazon and if you listen to anybody on youtube or see any of the reviews people absolutely love these things and for about 120 bucks i don't know how it can work good as good as everybody's saying it is um i'll be honest when i took it out of the box it feels kind of plasticky i mean it feels well built and there seems like there's a pretty big electric motor in there but i really don't know how it can work as good as they they say it does so i'm i'm here to kind of figure it out and see how it goes and share my results with you um i ended up going with the sun joe because i really like that it's a rake uh dethatcher as well as it comes with the scarifier i really like the sun joe because not only is it a rake dethatcher but it has the scarifying blades too so we can do both of those um i'm not sure yet if uh if i'm gonna need the scar fire or if the rake's going to do a good enough job it just all depends on how this thing works so hope you guys stick around see how it goes and and hopefully i can help you and whether you want to buy one of these or this is something that you might want to do at your house all right so i'll be honest at a first glance or when you're driving by or walking by my house the yard doesn't look too bad overall it's pretty green there's not a whole lot of weeds there's grass there so what's the big deal well when you get actually get on the lawn and you take a look at it a little bit closer like i do when i'm mowing it or using it it's not as good as it looks from the street which we'll find out here in a second so to start this project off i started off by mowing my yard and i mowed it down to about two and a quarter to two and a half inches and normally i like to let my lawn grow out to three to three and a half inches and that's my normal mowing height i like to mow it a little bit longer to encourage it to grow a little bit thicker only when we start to take a look at my lawn it's not getting any thicker and the reason that it's not getting any thicker i believe is because of all this dead or thatch that's in the lawn and when you look at this really close and you start pulling at it this stuff comes out really nice and easy and you can see that there's a bunch of these patches where there's all this thatchy grass that i want to get out of here so that's what the dethatcher is going to do for me or at least i hope it's going to do it's going to pull all this dead grass out of here and clear out some room for my grass to thicken up and kind of fill in those spaces all right first impressions of the sun joe using it for the first few passes the only thing that i can think of it sounds like a vacuum cleaner uh a really souped-up vacuum cleaner but i'll be honest with you once i got down there a few feet you start to see the grass pouring out of the chute on the back of this thing and there is a bag that you could use for it but everybody recommended just getting rid of it so i didn't even try it because it fills up so fast and i can see why they did that uh so the first few feet you don't see a whole lot of grass but once you get out there a little bit further you definitely see the grass starting to pour out of this thing and you can tell that it's working and it's doing what it's supposed to the one thing that i found out real quick was you have to go slow so this is going to be a slower process than if you would rent a machine from a rental place you do have to go slow but when you do go the proper speed you find out that this thing works pretty well the other annoying thing was the cord the extension cord it tends to get caught or you tend to have to move it around a whole lot if you're not going the correct direction that's an advantage to a gas machine over an electric machine but overall once once you get used to it wasn't too bad the other thing to note is you want to make sure that you're using the right gauge extension cord uh depending on the length you could use either a 12 or a 14 gauge extension cord it says that this stuff in the instructions but make sure you have a heavy duty duty extension cord because you're going to need it with this thing so so after the first few passes i decided to take a break and see what was actually happening here and at first glance you can see that there's a lot of grass sitting on top of the lawn so it looks like it's doing something and then you inspect it a little bit closer and we can take a look down there and you can actually see the dirt uh you can see that this thing is raking down into the grass and really pulling stuff out of there but because my lawn's so thick i still have a lot more to go [Music] once the first raking pass was done i went over the lawn with our lawnmower in the bagger attachment to try to pick up as much of that grass as possible and i was actually pleasantly surprised how fast that was and how much it actually picked up and then i started pouring it into a kiddie pool that we use for our dogs just to show you how much grass we're actually pulling out of the lawn little did i know how fast i would actually fill this thing up in total i filled up almost seven of the brown 30 gallon lawn bags from lowe's uh that puts this over right over 200 gallons of grass is what came out of this yard i think that's crazy then after all the loose stuff was picked up i repeated the same process going in the opposite direction last time i went vertical up and down this time i'm going horizontal across going in the opposite direction hopefully we'll pull uh fibers out of the grass or pull grass out of the lawn in a different direction hopefully getting a little bit more out of there the cool thing that i could see was i was pulling almost exactly the same amount or more out on the second pass that i did on the first and then i went back over with the lawn mower again pulled up all the grass and added it to my collection at this point i have two passes already done with the rake and i want to switch to the scarifier and it really was pretty easy two bolts and the rake comes off and then the the scarifier goes right on tighten those two bolts down and you're good to go it took about five minutes if that to switch this out and then you're ready to get back to the lawn with the scarifier on i chose to go in a third and different direction just to try to change it up a little bit to pull even more stuff out and kind of go at the the roots at a different angle and this thing really started digging deep and going after things i was i was really impressed i had this set on the lowest setting all the way down and i was pulling out of a lot of material and at this point you could really see the grooves starting to form in the grass and you could really see a whole lot of stuff going uh the nice thing about the scarifier is you can go a whole lot faster this is something you should not try at home but i wanted to do a kind of a demonstration while i was standing off the side and all the safety glasses and stuff on and you can really see how much grass is is coming out of this thing and you can see how aggressive this thing gets and pulling that stuff out of the out of the lawn and as i was alluding to earlier uh yeah it's pulling a ton of stuff out of there even more than i've been pulling out before and if you look close you can start to see those grooves forming it's nothing crazy where you're really cutting up your yard but you're definitely digging down you know 10 millimeters or so down into that first layer of thatch and dirt uh and it's really i think it'll let the the ground loosen up and let those roots kind of have some room to grow or get some air down in there and then once we're seeding it's my hope that that seed is gonna fall into those grooves and get some really good soil contact and hopefully start to germinate [Music] after finishing up the third direction or the first pass with the scarifier then i switched and went a fourth direction a diagonal in the opposite direction and in between those i didn't pick up or get rid of the the clippings or the the thatch that was pulled out of the yard the scarifier is so aggressive that i felt like it just chopped through it and i didn't waste my time kind of pulling that up i didn't really seem to make a difference to me [Applause] then for the last cleanup i decided to use the blower it would have been really nice to have a backpack blower save your back but for the last cleanup i wanted to make sure that i got as much of that grass out of the lawn as possible the lawnmower does a great job with the bagger of pulling that stuff up but i feel like the blower or a rake would definitely gets all of it [Applause] and then you can see i have a ton of grass that kiddie pool was nowhere near big enough to hold all this grass and then when you take a look at it the kiddie pool is actually inside that pile of grass here at the end to truly show you how much grass i got or how much thatch i got out of there and the yard actually looks greener than it did before all right so the last major step for me is overseeding and some people don't like to overseed in the spring and i get it uh if you don't get to it soon enough sometimes that new grass that is growing won't make it through the hot summer heat but i think i got to it soon enough and i think i have some good weather where we're going to get that grass to establish but in the name of keeping it simple i didn't buy any fancy grass seeds or anything like that special order i went to a local big box store lowe's and bought pennington seed and actually scotch seed the top stuff from pennington is an ohio state mix which i live in ohio so it's perfect it's a mix of perennial rye grass and bluegrass kentucky bluegrass and then i want to add a little bit more kentucky bluegrass to it because the percentage is super low in the ohio state mix and then to get it all started and going i bought a scots starter fertilizer the perennial rye should come up and i believe in about seven to ten days and then the kentucky bluegrass takes a little bit longer so we'll see what kind of results we get but i went out and you can see it's it's dark by now i went in one direction with the seed and then i went the opposite direction with the fertilizer then the last step would just be to water it and keep it wet you don't want to get it soaking wet you just want to keep it damp some people recommend watering three times a day luckily for me i have a whole bunch of rain coming in the next few days all right it's the next day and i worked till about 10 o'clock last night to make sure that i could finish this up um and the reason that i did it yesterday was because i saw a really nice day followed by a lot of rain and that's what happened all night last night then all day today it kind of was a nice gentle rain which was really good so hopefully that's going to set the seed in the fertilizer in those little grooves that the scarifier made and i think this worked out really well i'll be honest with you i i'm not paid by son joe i paid full price for this on amazon um i i'll tell you um i was a little nervous about this thing at first i mean i really didn't think that something that it was 120 dollars was gonna do the job that this thing did and i was really nervous when i got it out of the box it's mostly plastic it looks plastic but the internals of this thing are pretty darn nice to give you kind of some perspective my front yard here is about 2500 square feet we went over it twice raking in two different directions and then we went over it twice with the scarifier attachment and this thing never showed any signs of giving up or bogging down you definitely have to go a little bit slower with the rake and attack raking attachment to make sure that you're getting all that stuff out of the grass uh but the scarifier you could go pretty darn quick and get going i really haven't even had time to wash it or clean it up this is just the next day and i wanted to give you kind of my thoughts on my review of this um looking at the tools looking at the the actual scarifier blades and stuff they're they're barely even worn and then the one that i was really worried about was the the raking attachment it looks really really flimsy because it has these kind of spring-loaded little tines that are coming off of here um but other than being really dirty they're not in any way shaped damp damaged i think they have a lot of life on them and i think this this machine has a lot of life on it it's yet again it's not one of those machines that you're going to be using every single day just something that i'll probably use once in the spring maybe once in the middle of the summer very lightly and then something in the fall but but overall i i'm really impressed um i'll put a link down in the description of this in case you want to buy it it is an affiliate link so it might help the channel a little bit but no i i honestly i really highly recommend this um even if you don't buy the sun joe the greenworks one i heard is really good too the really the main reason i bought this one was for the scarifier attachment as well as well as the rake so my plans from here are to kind of document how the lawn actually does right now it looks pretty good actually i would say the lawn looks greener than it did before um i was afraid that it was going to tear everything up and it was going to look really bad actually the grass that's left is pretty green it's just a little patchy so i'm hoping that the existing grass starts to fill those voids or fill those holes and then some of that grass seed starts to take with that with the starter fertilizer and i think things are going to look pretty good but i'll keep track of the results i'll make sure that i'll give you guys an update here sometime soon and then in the fall i definitely plan on scarifying or aerating again and um and reseeding or overseeding again to see what results we get if you guys have any comments or any suggestions anything you think i did wrong anything you want to suggest for the future to help this come out you know looking a little bit better please throw them down there in the comments i'd love to hear them ultimately the goal is to keep this as simple as possible you know buy fertilizer and seed at lowe's or a local big box store use a cheaper machine and see what kind of results we can get so if you're liking this or you want to see how this ends up working out i suggest subscribing but anyway at any rate um i hope you guys enjoyed it and hopefully i see in another video you

Channel: That Tech Teacher

Views: 2,316,938

Rating: 4.8887882 out of 5

Keywords: That tech teacher, DIY, do it yourself, home improvement, Dethatcher, sun joe dethatcher, lawn dethatcher, lawn care, spring lawn care, greenworks, greenworks dethatcher, sun joe, overseed, dethatch and overseed, scarifier, how to dethatch, dethatching a lawn, how to dethatch a lawn, how to dethatch your yard, dethatching

Id: yZ2oyLkszXw

Length: 16min 51sec (1011 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021